ic and
human, adapted as it is to the world-wide cravings of the religious
instinct; satisfying the imagination and the emotions, no less than the
intellect and the will; and yet saving us from the perils of the
myth-making tendency of our mind.

The same thought is pressed upon us when we view the collective evidence
as to the universal demand for a mediatorial system--for intercessors,
and patrons, for a heavenly court surrounding the Heavenly Monarch; a
demand often created by and tending to a degradation of purer religion,
yet most surely embodying and expressing a spiritual instinct which is
only fully explained and satisfied by the Catholic doctrine of the
communion of saints and souls in one great society, labouring for a
conjoint salvation and beatitude. We Catholics know well enough that the
degraded and superstitious will pervert saint-worship as they pervert
other good things to their own hurt and to God's dishonour, but we also
know that of itself the doctrine of the Heavenly Court is altogether in
the interests of the very highest and purest religion. In all this
matter, needless to say, Mr. Lang is not with us; but the affinities of
Catholicism with universal religion, which he marks to our prejudice,
are really in some sort proof of our contention that the Church is the
divinely conceived fulfilment of all man's natural religious instincts,
providing harmless and healthy outlets for humours otherwise dangerous
and morbid; never forgetful of man's double nature and its claims,
neither wearying him with an impossible intellectualism--a religion of
pure philosophy--not suffering him to be the prey of mere imagination
and sentiment, but tempering the divine and human, the thought and the
word, so as to bring all his faculties under the yoke of Christ.

Mr. Lang's concern is with the universality of belief in God the
Rewarder, not with its origin nor even its value; though he seems at
times to imply that the solution may be found in a primitive revelation
of some sort. For ourselves, accordant as such a notion would be with
popular Christian tradition, we do not think that the adduced evidence
needs that hypothesis; but is explained sufficiently by "the hypothesis
of St. Paul," which, as Mr. Lang admits, "seem not the most
unsatisfactory." The mere verbal tradition of a primitive "deposit" not
committed to any authorized guardians would, to say the least, be a
hazardous and conjectural way of accounting for t