controversy of all kinds, dinned into the ears of
the faithful in a country like this, favours a fallacy of
intellectualism very prejudicial to the repose of a living faith founded
on concrete reasons, more or less experimental.

As far as the many are concerned, much the same difficulty attends the
preservation of their faith in these days, as attended its creation in
the beginnings of Christianity, before the little flock had grown into a
kingdom, when the intellect and power of the world was arrayed against
it, when it had neither the force of a world-wide consensus nor the
voice of public authority in its favour. In those days it was not by the
"persuasive words of human wisdom" that the crowds were gained over to
Christ, but by a certain _ostensio virtutis_, by an experimental and not
merely by a rational proof of the Gospel--a proof which, if it admitted
of any kind of formulation, did not compel them in virtue of the
logicality of its form. Further, when the conditions and helps needed by
the Church in her infancy, gave way to those belonging to her
established strength, it was by her ascendency over the strong, the
wealthy, and the learned, that she secured for the crowd,--for the weak
and the poor and the ignorant,--the most necessary support of a
Christianized, international public opinion, and thereby extended the
benefit of her educative influence to those millions whom disinclination
or weakness would otherwise have deterred from the profession and
practice of the faith.

If the Church of to-day is to retain her hold of the crowd in modernized
or modernizing countries, it must either be by renewing her ascendency
over those who form and modify public opinion, who even in the purest
democracy are ever the few and not the many; or else by a reversion to
the methods of primitive times, by some palpable argument that speaks as
clearly to the simplest as to the subtlest, if only the heart be right.
An outburst of miracle-working and prophecy is hardly to be looked for;
while the argument from the tree's fruits, or from the moral miracle, is
at present weakened by the extent to which non-Christians put in
practice the morality they have learnt from Christ. Other non-rational
causes of belief draw individuals, but they do not draw crowds.

If we cannot see very clearly what is to supply for the support once
given to the faith of the millions by public opinion, still their
incapacity for dealing with the questio