"For that you have got to face trouble—perhaps are facing it now—I know. I have thought about you again and again lately, when fighting my own battles. The hardest test of faith, after all, is to fight when one is not sure the cause is good. Thank God that you and I both know ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt. Beneath every paradox of the Catholic Church truth lies concealed, if we will but dig down to it. But there are days when toil is impossible; when merely to attempt work so hard and difficult brings sweat to one’s brow. And you will tell me, very truly, that, face to face with mental wreckage, to talk of paradox is small comfort. "You are a unit of a big battalion; only a unit, but you count. There are others to right and to left, in front and in rear of you; they will fall if you fail. You know that a regiment once was lost through one man’s cowardice. You and I have got to go on, whatever happens. We are not great generals—we are under command. Obedience is our watchword. "I remember in the South African War, before a certain action, the general sent out an army order to his men, which I copied at the time, but cannot lay my hands on just now. It ran something like this: ’You are dealing with a treacherous enemy; one who seeks to lower your honour by his own intrigue. Face that fact, and face him; it is the only way.’ The one simple thing in life for you and me lies in the fact that, after all, we have but one thing to do. We are fighting under a standard that we are going to uphold to the end. We shall bleed for it—a few drops of blood, more or less, really don’t matter; we shall probably fall for it—we shall have to remember then to hold our heads up, because the world might think that we were afraid; we shall die for it, knowing that it is still raised high in the sight of men, and that it will so rise, please God, through all the coming centuries as it has done in all its glorious past. "Rather cold comfort I am giving you, I suppose you will say. But you have been abroad, and seen life under different aspects, and watched great issues come to a climax as I have. Out in India, at the great Mahomedan festivals, I have walked ankle-deep through narrow streets reeking with blood. I once stood by the unlit _ghât_, and watched a man’s dead body thereon, and saw his little widow of twenty years old set a light to the pyre with her own slender fingers, in default of a son old enough to undertake the office. Such things make one think.