ted not so much by
an under-estimate of their due importance, as by an impatience with
those who over-estimated them, confounding the vessel with its contained
treasure.

When he says: "I believe in Christianity as it will be ten thousand
years hence," it would be a grave misinterpretation to suppose that he
implied any lack of belief in the Christianity of to-day. It is but
another assertion of his claim to be in sympathy with the esoteric
rather than the exoteric teaching of the present; to be on the mount
with the few and not on the plain with the many. For as the glacier
formed on the mountain slips slowly down to the plain, so, he held, the
esoteric teaching of to-day will be the popular teaching of future ages.
However little we may relish this distinction between "aristocratic" and
vulgar belief; however strongly we may hold that best knowledge of
God--that, namely, which is experimental and tactual rather than
intellectual or imaginative--is equally accessible to all; yet just so
far as there is question of the intellectual and imaginative forms in
which the faith is apprehended, the distinction does and must exist, not
only in religion but in every department of belief, as long as there are
different levels of culture in the same body of believers. It is, after
all, a much more superficial difference than it sounds--a difference of
language and symbolism for the same realities. Where language fits
close, as it does to things measurable by our senses, divergency makes
the difference between truth and error; but where it is question of the
substitution of one analogy or symbol for another, the more elegant is
not necessarily the more truthful; nor when we consider the infinite
inadequacy of even the noblest conceivable finite symbolism to bring God
down to our level, need we pride ourselves much for being on a mountain
whose height is perceptible from the plain but imperceptible from the
heavens.

Hence to say that the distinction between esoteric and exoteric teaching
means that the Church has two creeds, one for the simple, another for
the educated, is a thoughtless criticism which overlooks the necessarily
symbolic nature of all language concerning the "eternities," and
confounds a different mode of expression with a difference of the facts
and realities expressed.

Matthew Arnold, too, believed in the Catholicism of the future; but in
how different a sense! What he hoped for was, roughly speaking, the
pre