eran manual--tells us in another place,[18] referring to
this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that "the effective
knowledge of God and of Christ, in which knowledge faith lives, is
something entirely different. Nothing ought to find a place in Christian
doctrine that is not capable of helping man to recognize his sins, to
obtain the grace of God, and to serve Him in truth. Until that
time--that is to say, until Luther--the Church had accepted much as
_doctrina sacra_ which cannot absolutely contribute to confer upon man
liberty of heart and tranquillity of conscience." For my part, I cannot
conceive the liberty of a heart or the tranquillity of a conscience that
are not sure of their perdurability after death. "The desire for the
soul's salvation," Hermann continues, "must at last have led men to the
knowledge and understanding of the effective doctrine of salvation." And
in his book on the Christian's commerce with God, this eminent Lutheran
doctor is continually discoursing upon trust in God, peace of
conscience, and an assurance of salvation that is not strictly and
precisely certainty of everlasting life, but rather certainty of the
forgiveness of sins.

And I have read in a Protestant theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, that in the
conceptual order Protestantism has attained its highest reach in music,
in which art Bach has given it its mightiest artistic expression. This,
then, is what Protestantism dissolves into--celestial music![19] On the
other hand we may say that the highest artistic expression of
Catholicism, or at least of Spanish Catholicism, is in the art that is
most material, tangible, and permanent--for the vehicle of sounds is
air--in sculpture and painting, in the Christ of Velasquez, that Christ
who is for ever dying, yet never finishes dying, in order that he may
give us life.

And yet Catholicism does not abandon ethics. No! No modern religion can
leave ethics on one side. But our religion--although its doctors may
protest against this--is fundamentally and for the most part a
compromise between eschatology and ethics; it is eschatology pressed
into the service of ethics. What else but this is that atrocity of the
eternal pains of hell, which agrees so ill with the Pauline
apocatastasis? Let us bear in mind those words which the _Theologica
Germanica_, the manual of mysticism that Luther read, puts into the
mouth of God: "If I must recompense your evil, I must recompense it with
good, for