nded up on high, and
St. Dominic--

l' amoroso drudo
Della fede Cristiana, il santo atleta,
Benigno a' suoi, ed a' nemici crudo;[167]

and one greater yet, the warrior saint, Ignatius, raised their myriads of
every age and of both sexes, armed in that triple mail of poverty,
chastity, and obedience, "of whom the world was not worthy;"--that power,
to which have borne witness so many saintly Bishops, poor in the midst of
poverty, and humble in the exercise of more than royal power,--so many
scholars, marvellously learned,--so many, prodigal of labour and blood, who
are now counted among the noble army of martyrs,--so many holy women, who
have hidden themselves under the robe of the first of all saints, and
followed the Virgin of virgins in their degree;--that power is, indeed, the
most wondrous creation which history can record, and one to which I am not
ashamed to confess that I should bow with unmingled reverence, had not
truth a yet stronger claim upon me, and did not the voice of the early
Church, its Fathers, Councils, and Martyrs, sound distinctly in my ears
another language. Still, human and divine, ambition and Providence, are so
mingled there, that I would not utter a word more than truth requires. I
should even be compelled to give up the strongest individual conviction,
acknowledging the weakness and liability to err of any private judgment;
acknowledging, moreover, that a single province of the Church, if opposed
to all the rest, is certain to be in error, were it not that, besides the
voice of antiquity, we have witnesses the most legitimate, the most
time-honoured, the most unswerving in their testimony,--witnesses who take
away from our opponents their proudest claim,--nay, a claim which, if real,
would be irresistible,--that of being, by themselves, the Catholic Church.

Let it never, then, be forgotten, that any argument which would prove the
Church of England to be in schism would condemn likewise the Eastern and
Russian Church. It is not the Catholic Church against a revolted province,
as our adversaries would have us believe; it is the one Patriarch of the
West, with his Bishops, against the four Patriarchs of the East, with
theirs, and that great and, as yet, unbroken phalanx of the North, which
Constantinople won to the faith of old, and which now promises to beat back
the tide of heresy and infidelity from the beleaguered Sees of the East. On
this point of schism, at least,