e Spirit of God only in virtue of an arrangement
equally special.

If this be a true picture of the Catholic Church, and the place which
the only revelation we are concerned with ideally holds in the world,
there can be no _a priori_ difficulty in the passage from a natural
religion to such a supernatural one. The difficulties begin when we
compare the ideal picture with the actual facts; and it is true, when we
do this, that they at once confront us with a strength that seems
altogether disheartening. These difficulties are of two distinct kinds;
some, as in the case of natural theism, are moral; others are
historical. We will deal with the former first, beginning with that
which is at once the profoundest and the most obvious.

The Church, as has been said already, is ideally the parliament of the
whole believing world; but we find, as a matter of fact, that she is the
parliament of a small part only. Now what shall we say to this? If God
would have all men do His will, why should He place the knowledge of it
within reach of such a small minority of them? And to this question we
can give no answer. It is a mystery, and we must acknowledge frankly
that it is one. But there is this to say yet--that it is not a new
mystery. We already suppose ourselves to have accepted it in a simpler
form: in the form of the presence of evil, and the partial prevalence of
good. By acknowledging the claim of the special revelation in question,
we are not adding to the complexity of that old world-problem. I am
aware, however, that many think just the reverse of this. I will
therefore dwell upon the subject for a few moments longer. To many who
can accept the difficulty of the partial presence of good, the
difficulty seems wantonly aggravated by the claims of a special
revelation. These claims seem to them to do two things. In the first
place, they are thought to make the presence of good even more partial
than it otherwise would be; and secondly--which is a still greater
stumbling-block--to oblige us to condemn as evil much that would else
seem good of the purest kind. There are many men, as we must all know,
without the Church, who are doing their best to fight their way to God;
and orthodoxy is supposed to pass a cruel condemnation on these, because
they have not assented to some obscure theory, their rejection or
ignorance of which has plainly stained neither their lives nor hearts.
And of orthodoxy under certain forms this is no dou