ul self-denial. The number of accessions
to it has been thereby lessened, but (leaving out the case of the
transition of politicians from considerations of expediency) the quality
of them has been severely sifted. Incomparably the most valuable
acquisition which the American Catholic Church has received has been the
company of devoted and gifted young men, deeply imbued with the
principles and sentiments of the High-church party in the Episcopal
Church, who have felt constrained in conscience and in logic to take the
step, which seems so short, from the highest level in the Anglican
Church into the Roman, and who, organized into the Order of the Paulist
Fathers, have exemplified in the Roman Church so many of the highest
qualities of Protestant preaching.

He is a bold man who will undertake to predict in detail the future of
the Roman Church in America. To say that it will be modified by its
surroundings is only to say what is true of it in all countries. To say
that it will be modified for the better is to say what is true of it in
all Protestant countries. Nowhere is the Roman Church so pure from
scandal and so effective for good as where it is closely surrounded and
jealously scrutinized by bodies of its fellow-Christians whom it is
permitted to recognize only as heretics. But when the influence of
surrounding heresy is seen to be an indispensable blessing to the
church, the heretic himself comes to be looked upon with a mitigated
horror. Not with the sacrifice of any principle, but through the
application of some of those provisions by which the Latin theology is
able to meet exigencies like this,--the allowance in favor of
"invincible ignorance" and prejudice, the distinction between the body
and "the soul of the church,"--the Roman Catholic, recognizing the
spirit of Christ in his Protestant fellow-Christian, is able to hold him
in spiritual if not formal communion, so that the Catholic Church may
prove itself not dissevered from the Church Catholic. In the common
duties of citizenship and of humanity, in the promotion of the interests
of morality, even in those religious matters that are of common concern
to all honest disciples of Jesus Christ, he is at one with his heretic
brethren. Without the change of a single item either of doctrine or of
discipline, the attitude and temper of the church, as compared with the
church of Spain or Italy or Mexico, is revolutionized. The change must
needs draw with it other ch