ty may yield, but a Divine right on which
there must be no yielding. Yet, simultaneously, she will be infinitely
kind towards the heretic, since a thousand human motives and
circumstances may come in and modify his responsibility. At a word of
repentance she will readmit his person into her treasury of souls, but
not his heresy into her treasury of wisdom; she will strike his name
eagerly and freely from her black list of the rebellious, but not his
book from the pages of her Index. She exhibits meekness towards him and
_violence_ towards his error; since he is human, but her Truth is
Divine.

It is, then, from a modern confusion of thought with regard to the
realms of the Divine and the Human that the amazing inability arises, on
the world's part, to understand the respective principles on which the
Catholic Church acts in these two and utterly separate departments. The
world considers it reasonable for a country to defend its material
possessions by the sword, but intolerant and unreasonable for the Church
to condemn, _resisting even unto blood_, principles which she considers
erroneous or false. The Church, on the other hand, urges her children
again and again to yield rather than to fight when merely material
possessions are at stake, since Charity permits and sometimes even
commands men to be content with less than their own rights, and yet
again, when a Divine truth or right is at stake, here she will resist
unfaltering and undismayed, since she cannot be "charitable" with what
is not her own; here she will _sell her cloak_ and _buy that sword_
which, when the dispute was on merely temporal matters, she thrust back
again into its sheath.

To-day[1] as Christ rides into Jerusalem we see, as in a mirror, this
Paradox made plain. _Thy King cometh to thee, meek_. Was there ever so
mean a Procession as this? Was there ever such meekness and charity? He
Who, as His personal right, is attended in heaven by a _multitude on
white horses_, now, in virtue of His Humanity, is content with a few
fishermen and a crowd of children. He to Whom, in His personal right,
the harpers and the angels make eternal music is content, since He has
been made Man for our sakes, with the discordant shoutings of this
crowd. He Who _rode on the Seraphim and came flying on the wings of the
wind_ sits on the colt of an ass. He comes, meek indeed, from the golden
streets of the Heavenly Jerusalem to the foul roads of the Earthly,
laying aside His