t difficult to believe?
Yet Macaulay thought it so difficult to believe, that he had need of
a believer in it of talents as eminent as Sir Thomas More, before he
could bring himself to conceive that the Catholics of an enlightened
age could resist "the overwhelming force of the argument against it."
"Sir Thomas More," he says, "is one of the choice specimens of wisdom
and virtue; and the doctrine of transubstantiation is a kind of proof
charge. A faith which stands that test, will stand any test." But for
myself, I cannot indeed prove it, I cannot tell _how_ it is; but I
say, "Why should it not be? What's to hinder it? What do I know of
substance or matter? just as much as the greatest philosophers, and
that is nothing at all;"--so much is this the case, that there is a
rising school of philosophy now, which considers phenomena to
constitute the whole of our knowledge in physics. The Catholic
doctrine leaves phenomena alone. It does not say that the phenomena
go; on the contrary, it says that they remain: nor does it say that
the same phenomena are in several places at once. It deals with what
no one on earth knows anything about, the material substances
themselves. And, in like manner, of that majestic article of the
Anglican as well as of the Catholic Creed--the doctrine of the
Trinity in Unity. What do I know of the essence of the Divine Being?
I know that my abstract idea of three is simply incompatible with my
idea of one; but when I come to the question of concrete fact, I have
no means of proving that there is not a sense in which one and three
can equally be predicated of the Incommunicable God.

But I am going to take upon myself the responsibility of more than
the mere creed of the Church; as the parties accusing me are
determined I shall do. They say, that now, in that I am a Catholic,
though I may not have offences of my own against honesty to answer
for, yet, at least, I am answerable for the offences of others, of my
co-religionists, of my brother priests, of the Church herself. I am
quite willing to accept the responsibility; and, as I have been able,
as I trust, by means of a few words, to dissipate, in the minds of
all those who do not begin with disbelieving me, the suspicion with
which so many Protestants start, in forming their judgment of
Catholics, viz. that our creed is actually set up in inevitable
superstition and hypocrisy, as the original sin of Catholicism; so
now I will go on, as before, id