fect, he argues (at
least subconsciously), she can be nothing else than perfect; if she is
so Divine she can be in no sense human. Her pontiffs must all be saints,
her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is
Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest
movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no
self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, since
she is Divine?

Such are his first instincts. And then, little by little, his
disillusionment begins.

For, as he studies her record more deeply, he begins to encounter
evidences of her Humanity. He reads history, and he discovers here and
there a pontiff who but little in his moral character resembles Him
Whose Vicar he is. He meets an apostate priest; he hears of some
savagery committed in Christ's name; he talks with a convert who has
returned complacently to the City of Confusion; there is gleefully
related to him the history of a family who has kept the faith all
through the period of persecution and lost it in the era of toleration.
And he is shaken and dismayed. "How can these be in a Society that is
Divine? I had _trusted_ that it had been_ She _who should have redeemed
Israel;_ _and now--_!"

(ii) Another man approaches the record of Catholicism from the opposite
direction. To him she is a human society and nothing more; and he finds,
indeed, a thousand corroborations of his theory. He views her amazing
success in the first ages of Christianity--the rapid propagation of her
tenets and the growth of her influence--and sees behind these things
nothing more than the fortunate circumstance of the existence of the
Roman Empire. Or he notices the sudden and rapid rise of the power of
the Roman pontiff and explains this by the happy chance that moved the
centre of empire to the east and left in Rome an old prestige and an
empty throne. He sees how the Church has profited by the divisions in
Europe; how she has inherited the old Latin genius for law and order;
and he finds in these things an explanation of her unity and of her
claim to rule princes and kings. She is to him just human, and no more.
There is not, at first sight, a phenomenon of her life for which he
cannot find a human explanation. She is interesting, as a result of
innumerable complicated forces; she is venerable, as the oldest coherent
society in Europe; she has the advantage of Italian diplomacy; she has
been shrewd