"It may be," he answered, "as you say, that mankind does not progress, but merely revolves. Sometimes I have thought so. But nothing is repeated in precisely the same way. Neither an individual, nor a society, is what it imagines itself to be, in its action upon the world. The Church, as it is considered by its adherents, is something totally different from the Church as it seems to its directors. Every individual, and every age, examines the gospels in a different light and from a different standpoint, just as they examine the movement of the planets, the structure of the earth, the conception of kingship, of the State, even of that most immediate object the body. The life of St Francis seems to spring quite naturally out of the mediæval world, with its crude cosmogony, its notion of the universe as a huge mechanical toy in the hands of God. To such people the story of Joshua commanding the sun was not childish; miracles quite as wonderful were part of their daily lives; and the world for them acted not according to fixed immutable laws, but by the direct interposition of a Providence susceptible to the prayers of man. To us it is different. We cannot imagine a St Francis appearing in the modern world. The Church, Your Holiness, cannot control the new movement, which will either transform or destroy it; but in what will you suffer it to be transformed? "The evil of infallibility is that it cannot retract, or confess to error. The Pope has been endowed with this fatal gift of infallibility, a personal charisma, and through it he has become an incarnation of the Divine Wisdom, even as the Dalai Lama becomes an incarnation of the Buddha. To the historian, the heretical Pope Honorius, condemned equally by Councils, and by his successors, is sufficient to disprove your claims. But the Church can triumph over facts of history. What it cannot triumph over is the spirit of the age. You have a large body of adherents, who describe themselves as Catholic without knowing what the term implies. You have a smaller, body, whose principal business in life seems to lie in reconciling, by innumerable sophistries and subterfuges, your dogmas with the modern world. The smallest body of all is made up of those of your adherents, who accept you as the sole fount of truth. But in each of these three sections there is not a solitary individual who accepts your teaching without colouring it with his own ideas. Each will explain a dogma from the point of view of his own prejudices, and only accepts it with a kind of mental reservation. Of course it always has been so. Your peril lies in the rapid exchange of ideas which characterises modern life, the ease of communication, and the lack of any effective machinery for preventing their diffusion. The moment any crisis arises you cease to act as a solid body; and the action of your leaders has far less influence upon public opinion than the action of your laity excusing, or justifying, or explaining, the multitudinous