le: it persuades instead of convincing, it
seduces, it carries captive; it appeals to the sense of honour, or to the
imagination, or to the stimulus of curiosity; it makes its way by means of
gaiety, satire, romance, the beautiful, the pleasurable. Is it wonderful
that with an agent like this the Church should claim to deal with a vigour
corresponding to its restlessness, to interfere in its proceedings with a
higher hand, and to wield an authority in the choice of its studies and of
its books which would be tyrannical, if reason and fact were the only
instruments of its conclusions? But, any how, her principle is one and the
same throughout: not to prohibit truth of any kind, but to see that no
doctrines pass under the name of Truth but those which claim it
rightfully.

9.

Such at least is the lesson which I am taught by all the thought which I
have been able to bestow upon the subject; such is the lesson which I have
gained from the history of my own special Father and Patron, St. Philip
Neri. He lived in an age as traitorous to the interests of Catholicism as
any that preceded it, or can follow it. He lived at a time when pride
mounted high, and the senses held rule; a time when kings and nobles never
had more of state and homage, and never less of personal responsibility
and peril; when medieval winter was receding, and the summer sun of
civilization was bringing into leaf and flower a thousand forms of
luxurious enjoyment; when a new world of thought and beauty had opened
upon the human mind, in the discovery of the treasures of classic
literature and art. He saw the great and the gifted, dazzled by the
Enchantress, and drinking in the magic of her song; he saw the high and
the wise, the student and the artist, painting, and poetry and sculpture,
and music, and architecture, drawn within her range, and circling round
the abyss: he saw heathen forms mounting thence, and forming in the thick
air:--all this he saw, and he perceived that the mischief was to be met,
not with argument, not with science, not with protests and warnings, not
by the recluse or the preacher, but by means of the great
counter-fascination of purity and truth. He was raised up to do a work
almost peculiar in the Church,--not to be a Jerome Savonarola, though
Philip had a true devotion towards him and a tender memory of his
Florentine house; not to be a St. Charles, though in his beaming
countenance Philip had recognized the aureol of a s