"Indeed, yes," said Adelaide. "Our great regret is that we have not faith. The system which you propose is beautiful in all its bearings. It is our torment to feel that all that is beautiful in poetry or in art, nay, even in ethics, belongs to Catholicity, yet we do not belong to it. A hall of sculpture representing the Catholic ideal, as the figures of the duke's pantheon represent the pagan myth, would form the most sublime elucidation of the high triumphs of soul over self that could be imagined. There is no act of heroism, mental, moral, or physical, that would not find a representative in some authenticated historic personage. From martyrdom endured to maintain the truth of alleged facts, to voluntary poverty chosen as the best preservative of the disposition to receive and maintain truth, there is a regular chain of virtue personified. There is a reality about Catholicity (in books at least) which we find nowhere else." "Where is your difficulty, seeing that you admit all this?" "I can hardly explain it, yet it seems to shape itself thus: Why, if men are so blessed with a divine religion, is the world so bad? History gives us saints, sublime ones, who make our very souls thrill with the recital of their unselfish spirt, exemplified in act; but, on the other hand, the same history tells us of multitudes of bad men for one good one. The men who attempted to poison St. Benedict, were monks, men who had renounced all for Christ; and the multitudes were Catholic up to the fifteenth century, yet what fearful struggles for power, and indulgence of luxury in high places, and of crime among all, high and low! Most of the saints were reformers, combating with their fellow-Catholics for virtue; and now, are all Catholics unselfish, unworldly?"