In general, then, the moral arguments against the Church as drawn from History--that is, from the record of its action--fail from one of two causes: either they misconceive the nature of the Church (_what_ it is that speaks with Infallible Authority; _on what_ it has spoken with Infallible Authority), or they are confused as to the implications of religion, not perceiving that, if you are to admit any criterion of truth other than that of common experience, you must admit external authority; and that, once you admit an external authority in the final and all important questions, you admit a Church. Such considerations do not establish the claim of the Catholic Church, but they destroy certain particular objections to that claim, drawn from the supposed clash between the moral character of the Church’s claim and the historical record of the Church making such a claim. From these I turn to what I have called the major objection of modern times: the intellectual objection; the objection that History shows the structure of the Catholic Church to have proceeded from man. II. THE MAJOR OR INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENT The last and much the most important division of the arguments based upon History against the Catholic claim is, in general, the argument that the Church cannot be the divine thing it claims to be because it is in its essence demonstrably man-made: it is in its essence, and can be proved by History to be, of human institution, betraying all those characteristic illusions which man conjures up and imposes upon himself in all his efforts to reach out to the unknowable and unattainable of his desire. This--by far the most serious historical form of attack upon the Faith--falls into two distinct branches, which I will call for the sake of brevity (without pretence to the full accuracy of the terms and certainly with no intention of using them abusively) the _Protestant_ and the _Pagan_. I mean by the _Protestant_ argument that argument against the Faith drawn from History which maintains that the Church has suffered fundamental corruption and has lost some presupposed original character through the increasing delusions of the human mind. I call the _Pagan_ or purely Sceptical argument that which denies, on the testimony of History, that there ever has been a divine Church at all, or any clear revelation of divine things to men at any time or in however simple a form, and proposes to prove that all the doctrine of the Church is of man’s own making. These two I will take successively, maintaining the order I have throughout, to wit, attending to the least important before approaching the more important.