Hence it befalls that no place is found in the Protestant heaven for the great majority of ordinary people who do not feel a bit good or religious, who rather dislike going to church and keeping the commandments, and yet who keep them all the same, because they believe in God and fear His judgments and honour His law, and even love Him in the solid, undemonstrative way in which a naughty and troublesome child loves its parents. That such a character as Madge Riversdale's should cover a small, firm core of faith and fear under a cortex of worldliness and frivolity; that religion should have such a hold on one so entirely irreligious by nature, is something quite inconceivable to a mind like, let us say, Mrs. Humphrey Ward's; and yet absolutely intelligible to the ordinary Catholic. The Church to us, is not what it is to the Protestant--a sort of pasture land in which we are at liberty to browse if we are piously disposed. It is not merely a convenient environment for the development of the religious faculty. She stands to us in the relation of shepherd, with a more than parental authority to feed and train our souls through infancy to maturity; that is, from the time when we do not know or like what is good for us, to the time when we begin to appreciate and spontaneously follow her directions. Just then as a child, however naturally recalcitrant and ill-disposed, retains a certain fundamental goodness and root of recovery so long as it acknowledges and obeys the authority of its father and mother; so the ordinary unreligious Catholic, who has been brought up to believe in the divine authority of the Church, finds therein all the protection that obedience offers to those who are incapable of self-government. "In Madge's eyes the woman who married an innocent divorcee was no more than his mistress." Had Madge been a pious Protestant she naturally might have examined the question of divorce on its own merits; she might have weighed the pros and cons of the problem; she might have consulted God in prayer, and have listened to this clergyman on one side; and to that, on the other: but eventually she would have been thrown upon herself; she would have had no one whose decision she was bound to obey. But wild and lawless as she is, yet being a Catholic there is one voice on earth which she fears to disbelieve or disobey. Looked at even from a human standpoint, the consensus of a world-wide, ancient, organized society like the Roman Church cannot but exert a powerful pressure on the minds of its individual members. It would need no ordinary rebellion of the will for a thoughtless girl to shake her mind so free of that influence as to live happily in the state of revolt. But where in addition to this the Church is viewed as speaking in the name of God, and as so representing Him on earth that her ban or blessing is inseparable from His, it is obvious that such a belief in her claims will give her a power for good