May we not take this for a principle,--to believe that God does everything, and then to act as though He left everything for us to do? Or this: Since grace supposes nature, the growth and strength of the Church is not wholly independent of the natural endowments of her ministers? As a matter of fact we Catholics are constantly speaking and acting upon principles of this kind. We maintain that without a proper education our children must lose the faith; and that without careful moral and mental training no man is likely to become a good priest; and all that I further insist upon is that if he is to do the best work, he must have the best intellectual discipline. In an intellectual age, at least, he cannot be the worthy minister of worship, unless he is also the accomplished teacher of truth. In vain shall we clothe him in rich symbolic vestments, place him in majestic temples, before marble altars, in the midst of solemn music, in the dim sober-tinted light, with the great and noble looking out upon him, as from a spirit world,--in vain shall all this be, if when he himself speaks, his words are felt to be but the echo of a coarse and empty mind. And hence our enemies would gladly leave us the poetry of our worship, would even enter our churches to be comforted, to be soothed, to seek the elevation and enlargement of thought and sentiment which comes upon us in the presence of what is vast, mysterious, and sublime, if we would but confess that it is only poetry, good and beautiful only as art is good and beautiful. The spirit of the time, in fact, it seems to me, is more and more disposed to grant us everything except the possession of intellectual truth. That the Catholic Church is a marvellous power; that her triumphs have been so enduring and so unexpected that only the foolish or the ignorant will predict her downfall; that she overcame paganism; that she saved Christianity when Rome fell; that she restrained the ferocity of the barbarians, protected the weak, encouraged labor, preserved the classics, maintained the unity and sanctity of marriage, defended the purity and dignity of woman, espoused the cause of the oppressed, and in a lawless and ignorant age proclaimed the supremacy of right and the worth of learning; that to these signal services must be added her power to give ease and pleasantness to the social relations of men, keeping them equally remote from Puritan severity and pagan license; her eye for beauty and grace, which has made her the foster-mother of all the arts; her love of the excellent and the noble, which has enabled her to create types of character that are immortal; her practical wisdom, giving her the secret of dealing with every phase of life, so that her saints are doctors, apostles, mystics, philanthropists, artists, poets, kings, beggars, warriors, peasants, barbarians, philosophers,--all this, if I mistake not, unbelievers even are more and more willing to concede.