right, that is wrong.
Better to be inconsistent in truth, than consistent in a mistake.
And your Romish idea of man is a mistake--utterly wrong and absurd--
except in the one requirement of righteousness and godliness, which
Protestants and heathen philosophers have required and do require
just as much as you. My dear Luke, your ideal men and women won't
do--for they are not men and women at all, but what you call
"saints" . . . Your Calendar, your historic list of the Earth's
worthies, won't do--not they, but others, are the people who have
brought Humanity thus far. I don't deny that there are great souls
among them; Beckets, and Hugh Grostetes, and Elizabeths of Hungary.
But you are the last people to praise them, for you don't understand
them. Thierry honours Thomas a Becket more than all Canonisations
and worshippers do, because he does see where the man's true
greatness lay, and you don't. Why, you may hunt all Surius for such
a biography of a mediaeval worthy as Carlyle has given of your Abbot
Samson. I have read, or tried to read your Surius, and Alban
Butler, and so forth--and they seemed to me bats and asses--One
really pitied the poor saints and martyrs for having such blind
biographers--such dunghill cocks, who overlooked the pearl of real
human love and nobleness in them, in their greediness to snatch up
and parade the rotten chaff of superstition, and self-torture, and
spiritual dyspepsia, which had overlaid it. My dear fellow, that
Calendar ruins your cause--you are "sacres aristocrates"--kings and
queens, bishops and virgins by the hundred at one end; a beggar or
two at the other; and but one real human lay St. Homobonus to fill
up the great gulf between--A pretty list to allure the English
middle classes, or the Lancashire working-men!--Almost as charmingly
suited to England as the present free, industrious, enlightened, and
moral state of that Eternal City, which has been blest with the
visible presence and peculiar rule, temporal as well as spiritual,
too, of your Dalai Lama. His pills do not seem to have had much
practical effect there. . . . My good Luke, till he can show us a
little better specimen of the kingdom of Heaven organised and
realised on earth, in the country which does belong to him, soil and
people, body and soul, we must decline his assistance in realising
that kingdom in countries which don't belong to him. If the state
of Rome don't