“The entire childhood of these young girls had been passed at Naples, and they had been there environed by impressions which nothing in their Greek faith, no matter how lively it might have been, could counteract. The adoration of Jesus Christ, the veneration of the Holy Virgin and the saints, faith in the power of absolution and the real presence in the Blessed Sacrament, were the grand and fundamental doctrines which they had imbibed with their mother’s milk. Brought up at a distance from their own country, they might almost have believed themselves to be in the centre of their own religion, living as they were within the bounds of that great church which possesses all the gifts claimed by their own, with the added power of distributing and communicating them to all, without distinction of place, language, nation, or race. It is difficult to comprehend how any Russian whose soul is imbued with piety, on returning to his own country after having been brought up abroad, can find himself at ease in the bosom of Greek orthodoxy. In truth, it appears to us that the limits of a national church must seem very suffocating to any one who has felt, even for an instant, the pulsation of that universal life in the heart of the Catholic Church which is unconfined by mountains, rivers, or seas, which is contained within no barriers of any kind whatever, and bears the name of no particular nation, because it is the mother of all nations collectively. Therefore no one ever has been or ever will be able to fasten any denomination of this sort upon the only church who dares affirm that she alone possesses the truth in all its completeness. At the first view one would say that every church ought to make this claim under the penalty of being deprived of any reason for its existence. It is nevertheless true that only one loudly proclaims it; and those who hate as well as those who love the Catholic Church alike declare that she is a church in this respect singular among all others. Thus has she preserved through all ages a designation expressive of the idea realized in herself, and will preserve the same for all coming time! A multitude of her children have separated themselves from her, yet none of them have succeeded in despoiling her of the glorious title which suffices to make her recognized everywhere and by all. As for other churches or sects, when it is not the name of some man or nation which they substitute for her name, it is some kind of term or epithet which, even when it aims at giving a semblance of antiquity, betrays novelty in the very fact that it is necessary to employ it in order to be understood; and this is true in our own day just as much as it was in the time of St. Augustine. The overwhelming force of good sense and all the laws of human language determine _that words