"Can Leadham, can anyone deny that the nation rose in them to the full stature of its manhood--to a buoyant and fruitful maturity? And more--if it had not been for some profound movement of the national life,--some irresistible revolt of the common intelligence, the common conscience--does anyone suppose that the whims and violences of any trumpery king could have broken the links with Rome?--that such a life and death as More's could have fallen barren on English hearts? Never!--How shallow are all the official explanations--how deep down lies the truth!" Out of the monologues that followed, broken often by the impatience or the eagerness of Dalton, Molly, at least, who worked much with her father, remembered fragments like the following: "... The figure of the Church,--spouse or captive, bride or martyr,--as she has become personified in Catholic imagination, is surely among the greatest, the most ravishing, of human conceptions. It ranks with the image of 'Jahve's Servant' in the poetry of Israel. And yet behind her, as she moves through history, the modern sees the rising of something more majestic still--the free human spirit, in its contact with the infinite sources of things!--the Jerusalem which is the mother of us all--the Greater, the Diviner Church.... Into her Ursula-robe all lesser forms are gathered. But she is not only a maternal, a generative power--she is chastisement and convulsion. "... Look back again to that great rising of the North against the South, that we call the Reformation.--Catholicism of course is saved with the rest.--One may almost say that Newman's own type is made possible--all that touches and charms us in English Catholics has its birth, because York, Canterbury, and Salisbury are lost to the Mass. "And abroad?--I always find a sombre fascination in the spectacle of the Tridentine reform. The Church in her stern repentance breaks all her toys, burns all her books! She shakes herself free from Guicciardini's 'herd of wretches.' She shuts her gates on the knowledge and the freedom that have rent her--and within her strengthened walls she sits, pondering on judgment to come. In so far as her submission is incomplete, she is raising new reckonings against herself every hour.--But for the moment the moralising influence of the lay intelligence has saved her--a new strength flows through her old veins. "... And so with scholarship.--The great fabric of Gallican and Benedictine learning rises into being, under the hammer blows of a hostile research. The Catholics of Germany, says Renan, are particularly distinguished for acuteness and breadth of ideas. Why? Because of the 'perpetual contact of Protestant criticism.'-- "... More and more we shall come to see that it is the World that is the salt of the Church! She owes far more to her enemies than to any of her canonised saints. One may almost say that she lives on what the World can spare her of its virtues."