vourable to the sounder conception of
the Eucharistic Sacrifice as a food-offering complementary to the
Sacrifice of the Cross. Above all it is in bringing out the unity of
type between natural ethnic religions, and that revealed Catholic
religion which is their correction and fulfilment, that the studies of
Mr. Lang and Mr. Jevons are of such service. The militant Protestant
delights to dwell on the analogies between Romanism and Paganism; we too
may dwell on them with delight, as evidence of that substantial unity of
the human mind which underlies all surface diversities of mode and
language, and binds together, as children of one family, all who believe
in God the Rewarder of them that seek Him, who is no respecter of
persons. What man in his darkness and sinfulness has feebly been trying
to utter in every nation from the beginning, that God has formulated and
written down for him in the great Catholic religion of the Word made
Flesh--

Which he may read that binds the sheaf
Or builds the house, or digs the grave,
And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef.

True, even could it be established beyond all doubt that belief in the
one God were universal among rude and uncultivated races, this would not
add any new proof to the truth of religion, unless it could be shown
that it was really an instinctive, inwritten judgment, and not one of
those many natural fallacies into which all men fall until they are
educated out of them. Still, for those who do not need conviction on
this point, it is no slight consolation to be assured that simplicity
and savagery do not shut men out from the truths best worth knowing;
that even where the earthen vessel is most corrupted, the heavenly
treasure is not altogether lost; that it is only those who deliberately
go in search of obscurities who need stumble. It was not the crowds of
pagandom that St. Paul censured, but the philosophers. God made man's
feet for the earth, and not for the tight-rope. Whatever be the truth
about Idealism, man is by nature a Realist; and similarly he is by
nature a theist, until he has studiously learnt to balance himself in
the non-natural pose.

Will a man be excused for deliberately dashing his foot against a stone
because forsooth he has persuaded himself with Zeno, that there is no
such thing as motion; or with Berkeley, that the externality of the
world is a delusion; or will he be pardoned in his unbelief