eals of _all_ Christian life, not
as the ideals of a select few. While religious teachers asquiesce in the
present set of compromises as an adequate expression of Christian
character, we may expect a decline in the Church as a spiritual force,
whatever may be true of it as a social force.

If Christian ideals are to resume their appeal to the membership of the
Church as a whole it is requisite that they be studied by the clergy and
intelligently presented. But little is to be hoped in this direction so
long as our theological training ignores religion and concentrates its
attention on something that it takes for scholarship. The raw material
that is sent by our parishes to the seminaries to be educated for Holy
Orders is commonly turned out of the seminary with less religion that it
entered. The outlook for the presentation of Christian ideals is not
hopeful. We seem destined to drift on indefinitely in our habitual
compromises.

All the more is it necessary that we should lift our eyes to the heavens
where humility and meekness, where sacrifice and obdience, are, in the
person of Blessed Mary, crowned as the most perfect expression of
sanctity, as the qualities that raise man nearest God. And what consoles
us in the present depressing circumstances of the Church is that we are
permitted to look through S. John's eyes into the world of heaven, and
there see "a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations,
and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues, before the throne and before the
Lamb, clothed with white robes, and with palms in their hands." Somehow,
we feel, under whatever distressing and discouraging circumstances, the
work of God in the regeneration of souls goes on. No doubt it is a work
that is largely hidden from our eyes, from those eyes which are blinded
to the reality of spiritual things. Humility and meekness are the
qualities of a hidden life; they do not flaunt themselves before men's
eyes. But in their silence and obscurity great souls are growing up,
growing to the spiritual status of the saints of God. In our estimate of
values we shall do well to lay to heart the utterances of WISDOM: "Then
shall the righteous man stand in great boldness before the face of such
as have afflicted him, and made no account of his labours. When they see
it, they shall be troubled with terrible fear, and shall be amazed at
the strangeness of his salvation, so far beyond all that they had looked
for. And they repe