ough various
intellectual stages in the past, and which depends for its vitality upon
the existence of reasonable freedom of change in the future. He
therefore calls himself a Catholic. To the Pope and his advisers, on the
other hand, the Church is an unchanging miracle based on an unchanging
revelation. Father Tyrrell, when he says that he 'believes' in the
Catholic Church, though he obviously disbelieves in the actual
occurrence of most of the facts which constitute the original
revelation, seems to them to be simply a liar, who is stealing their
name for his own fraudulent purposes. They can no more understand him
than can the Ultramontanes among the German Social-Democrats understand
Bernstein and his Modernist allies. Bernstein himself, on the other
hand, has to choose whether he ought to try to keep open the common use
of the name Socialist, or whether in the end he will have to abandon it,
because his claim to use it merely creates bad feeling and confusion of
thought.

Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and power of expression
is, so to speak, a party--a political entity--in himself. He may fashion
a permanent and recognisable mask for himself as 'Honest John' or 'The
Grand Old Man.' But this can as a rule only be done by those who learn
the main condition of their task, the fact that if an individual
statesman's intellectual career is to exist for the mass of the present
public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence to
unchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent.
The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towards
politics is like a very slow photograph plate. He who wishes to be
clearly photographed must stand before it in the same attitude for a
long time. A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark.

'Change of opinion,' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whose
judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to
the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a
course which they know to be wrong. It is not always to be blamed. But
it is always to be watched with vigilance; always to be challenged and
put upon its trial.'[19] Most statesmen avoid this choice between the
loss of force resulting from a public change of opinion, and the loss of
character resulting from the public persistence in an opinion privately
abandoned, not only by considering carefully every change in their own
conclu