ained at full strength through
the centuries to our day two things of which the New Testament was
full, and which are characteristic of it--devotion and self-sacrifice.
The crowds at a pilgrimage, a shrine, or a "pardon" were much more like
the multitudes who followed our Lord about the hills of Galilee--like
them probably in that imperfect faith which we call superstition--than
anything that could be seen in the English Church, even if the
Salvation Army were one of its instruments. And the spirit which
governed the Roman Church had prevailed on men to make the sacrifice of
celibacy a matter of course, as a condition of ministering in a regular
and systematic way not only to the souls, but to the bodies of men, not
only for the Priesthood, but for educational Brotherhoods, and Sisters
of the poor and of hospitals. Devotion and sacrifice, prayer and
self-denying charity, in one word sanctity, are at once on the surface
of the New Testament and interwoven with all its substance. He recoiled
from a representation of the religion of the New Testament which to his
eye was without them. He turned to where, in spite of every other
disadvantage, he thought he found them. In S. Filippo Neri he could
find a link between the New Testament and progressive civilisation. He
could find no S. Filippo--so modern and yet so Scriptural--when he
sought at home.
His mind, naturally alive to all greatness, had early been impressed
with the greatness of the Church of Rome. But in his early days it was
the greatness of Anti-Christ. Then came the change, and his sense of
greatness was satisfied by the commanding and undoubting attitude of
the Roman system, by the completeness of its theory, by the sweep of
its claims and its rule, by the even march of its vast administration.
It could not and it did not escape him, that the Roman Church, with all
the good things which it had, was, as a whole, as unlike the Church of
the New Testament and of the first ages as the English. He recognised
it frankly, and built up a great theory to account for the fact,
incorporating and modernising great portions of the received Roman
explanations of the fact. But what won his heart and his enthusiasm was
one thing; what justified itself to his intellect was another. And it
was the reproduction, partial, as it might be, yet real and
characteristic, in the Roman Church of the life and ways of the New
Testament, which was the irresistible attraction that tore him f
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