If we turn from the great systems to the local worships we find another character, wholly separate from that apparent in Catholicism: that they do not pretend to certitude; they pretend to no more than the satisfaction of emotion and to a corporation tradition. They have their myths, but will readily accept them as myths or compare them unoffended with the myths of others. They have their sanctities: but their sanctities make no pretence at all to be universal. There was one, and only one, historical phenomenon, which in this point did compare with the Faith--the phenomenon of the Jewish religion; and that is precisely why we Catholics call the Jewish religion the forerunner of our own and the preparation of the world for its Incarnate God. But is it not true that there are countless ceremonies and also major doctrines, comparable to and some even nearly identical with those of the Faith? It is; and to that we answer that if there is to be such a thing as the Faith on earth, it could not but be so. If men must worship, they will worship in places. If men feel the pull of a religious emotion, at once the sacramental idea must enter in. There cannot but be a connection between the physical life of man and any religious system whatsoever, true or false, with which he is inmixed. And so surely as the ministers of the true religion will breathe and eat and walk upon their feet, each as much as the ministers of the false, so surely you will find in a true religion, if true religion there be, habits, practices, doctrines, which (not all combined, but here one, there another) men have groped for or arrived at in systems which attempted or adumbrated the truth, but did not even claim to be the full truth. It is not an historical argument against the divinity of this one thing that it has the qualities which human things must have. Upon the contrary, it is an argument in favour of its claim. That the unique object here displayed, the Catholic Church, is divine cannot on this account be affirmed; but it can be affirmed that if such a unique object exist, then it will have these characters attaching to it. A man making a survey of what little is known of the old religious experiments and perversions of mankind, and being asked, as a pure hypothesis, “Suppose a divine society, corporate, distinct, highly organised, and therefore of highly differentiated function, were to arise on earth to bear witness to the Living God: suppose such a thing for the sake of argument only, what, think you, would such a body present by way of appearance, action and thought?” could not but answer that it would have of necessity present within it not only vital truths, but also practices discoverable wherever man had groped at or half remembered a revelation.