e city of the spirit, because to guard its liberties she has had
to defend and strengthen her own position. I do not ask you to consider
whence comes this insight into the needs of man, this mysterious power
over him; I ask you simply to confess them in their results. I am not of
those who believe that God permits good to come to mankind through one
channel only, and I doubt not that now and in times past the thinkers
whom your Highness follows have done much to raise the condition of
their fellows; but I would have you observe that, where they have done
so, it has been because, at bottom, their aims coincided with the
Church's. The deeper you probe into her secret sources of power, the
more you find there, in the germ if you will, but still potentially
active, all those humanising energies which work together for the
lifting of the race. In her wisdom and her patience she may have seen
fit to withhold their expression, to let them seek another outlet; but
they are there, stored in her consciousness like the archetypes of the
Platonists in the Universal Mind. It is the knowledge of this, the sure
knowledge of it, which creates the atmosphere of serenity that you feel
about you. From the tilling of the vineyards, or the dressing of a
beggar's sores, to the loftiest and most complicated intellectual labour
imposed on him, each brother knows that his daily task is part of a
great scheme of action, working ever from imperfection to perfection,
from human incompleteness to the divine completion. This sense of being,
not straws on a blind wind of chance, but units in an ordered force,
gives to the humblest Christian an individual security and dignity which
kings on their thrones might envy.

"But not only does the Church anticipate every tendency of mankind;
alone of all powers she knows how to control and direct the passions she
excites. This it is which makes her an auxiliary that no temporal prince
can well despise. It is in this aspect that I would have your Highness
consider her. Do not underrate her power because it seems based on the
commoner instincts rather than on the higher faculties of man. That is
one of the sources of her strength. She can support her claims by reason
and argument, but it is because her work, like that of her divine
Founder, lies chiefly among those who can neither reason nor argue, that
she chooses to rest her appeal on the simplest and most universal
emotions. As, in our towns, the streets are