it protests, the more consistently Protestant it will be. Since, then, its
name becomes continually truer, it must subsist until it perishes, just as
an ulcer disappears with the last atom of the flesh which it has been
eating away."(106)

But similar causes will produce similar results. As both revolutions were
the offspring of rebellion; as both have been marked by the same vigorous
youth, the same precocious manhood, the same premature decay and
dismemberment of parts; so we are not rash in predicting that the
dissolution which long since visited the former is destined, sooner or
later, to overtake the latter. But the Catholic Church, because she is the
work of God, is always "renewing her strength, like the eagle's."(107) You
ask for a miracle, as the Jews asked our Saviour for a sign. You ask the
Church to prove her divine mission by a miraculous agency. Is not her very
survival the greatest of prodigies? If you beheld some fair bride with all
the weakness of humanity upon her, cast into a prison and starved and
trampled upon, hacked and tortured, her blood sprinkled upon her dungeon
walls, and if you saw her again emerging from her prison, in all the bloom
and freshness of youth, and surviving for years and centuries beyond the
span of human life, continuing to be the joyful mother of children, would
you not call that scene a miracle?

And is not this a picture of our Mother, the Church? Has she not passed
through all these vicissitudes? Has she not tasted the bitterness of
prison in every age? Has not her blood been shed in every clime?

And yet in her latter days, she is as fair as ever, and the nursing mother
of children. Are not civil governments and institutions mortal as well as
men? Why should the Republic of the Church be an exception to the law of
decay and death? If this is not a miracle, I know not what a miracle is.

If Augustin, that profound Christian philosopher, could employ this
argument in the fifth century, with how much more force may it be used
today, fifteen hundred years after his time!

But far be it from us to ascribe to any human cause this marvelous
survival of the Church.

Her indestructibility is not due, as some suppose, to her wonderful
organization, or to the far-reaching policy of her Pontiffs, or to the
learning and wisdom of her teachers. If she has survived, it is not
because of human wisdom, but often in spite of human folly. Her permanence
is due not to the arm of the fle