So too, in her dealings with society, is her policy judged suicidal by a world that is in love with its own kind of life. It is suicidal, cries that world, to relinquish in France all on which the temporal life of the Church depends; for how can that society survive which renounces the very means of existence? It is suicidal to demand the virgin life of the noblest of her children, suicidal to desert the monarchical cause of one country, and to set herself in opposition to the Republican ideals of another. For even she, after all, is human and must conform to human conditions. Even she, however august her claims, must make terms with the world if she desires to live in it. And this comment has been made upon her actions in every age. She condemned Arius, when a little compromise might surely have been found; and lost half her children. She condemned Luther and lost Germany; Elizabeth, and lost England. At every crisis she has made the wrong choice, she has yielded when she should have resisted, resisted when she should have yielded. The wonder is that she survives at all. Yes, that is the wonder. _As dying, behold she lives_! II. The answer of course is easy. It is that she simply does not desire the kind of life which the world reckons alone to be life. To her that is not life at all. She desires of course to survive as a human society, and she is assured that she always shall so survive. Yet it is not on the ordinary terms of ordinary society that she desires survival. It is not a _natural_ life of which she is ambitious, a life that draws its strength from human conditions and human environment, a life, therefore, that waxes and wanes with those human conditions and ultimately meets their fate, but a _supernatural_ life that draws its strength from God. And she recognizes, as one of the most fundamental paradoxes of all, that such a life can be gained and held only through what the world calls "death." She does not, then, want merely the life of a prosperous human state, whether monarchy or republic. There are times indeed in her history when such an accompaniment to her real existence is useful to her effectiveness; and she has, of course, the right, as have other societies, to earthly dominions that may have been won and presented to her by her children. Or through her ministers, as in Paraguay, she may administer for a while the ordinary civil affairs of men who choose to be loyal to her government. Yet if, for one instant, such a responsibility were really to threaten her spiritual effectiveness--if, that is, the choice were really presented to her between spiritual and temporal dominion--she would let all the kingdoms of the world go in an instant, to retain her kingdom from God; she would gladly _suffer the loss of all things_ to retain Christ. And how is it possible to deny for one instant that her success has been startling and overwhelming--this fructification of Life by Death.