carve a thousand acorns, so cunningly coloured, and so admirably
contrived as to be practically indistinguishable from the genuine
fruit of the oak. Each of these thousand artists may present me with
his manufactured acorn, and may assure me of its genuineness. And,
alas! I may be quite deceived and taken in; yes, but only _for a
time_. When I plant them in the soil, together with the genuine acorn,
and give them time to develop, the fraud is detected, and the truth
revealed. For the real seed proves its worth. How? In the simplest way
possible, that is to say, by actually doing what it was destined and
created to do. That is, by growing and developing into a majestic oak,
while the false and human imitations fall to pieces, belie all one's
hopes, and are found to produce neither branch nor leaf nor fruit.

This is but an illustration of what may be observed equally in the
spiritual order, although there it is attended by more disastrous
consequences. Thus we find hundreds of Churches proclaiming themselves
to be foundations of God, which Time, the old Justice who tries all
such offenders, soon proves, most unmistakably, to be nothing but the
contrivances of man. They may bear a certain external resemblance to
the true Church, planted by the Divine Husbandman, but like the
man-made acorns, they deceive all our expectations, and are wholly
unable to redeem their promises, or to live up to their pretensions.

For, while one and all declare with their lips that they possess the
truth as revealed by Christ, their glaring divisions, irreconcilable
differences, and internal dissensions emphatically prove that the
truth is not in them: and that they have been built, not on the rock,
but on the shifting sand, and are the erections, not of God, but of
feeble, fickle men.

On the other hand, the Catholic Church, amid a thousand sects,
resembles the genuine acorn among the thousand imitations. Not only
does she alone possess the whole truth; but she alone can stand up and
actually prove this claim to the entire world, by pointing defiantly
at her marvellous and miraculous unity--a unity so conspicuous, and so
striking, and so absolutely unique, that even the hostile and bigoted
Protestant press can sometimes scarcely refrain from bearing an
unwilling testimony to it.

We might give many instances of this, and quote from many sources, but
let the following extract from London's leading journal serve as an
example. It is no othe