And then again a Catholic, one who would be a proudly devoted and grateful son of the Roman Church, speaks and thinks throughout the following pages. Yet it is his very Catholicism which makes him feel, with a spontaneous and continuous keenness, that only if there are fragments, earlier stages and glimpses of truth and goodness extant wheresoever some little sincerity exists, can the Catholic Church even conceivably be right. For though Christianity and Catholicism be the culmination and fullest norm of all religion, yet to be such they must find something thus to crown and measure: various degrees of, or preparations for, their truth have existed long before they came, and exist still, far and wide, now that they have come. Otherwise, Marcion would have been right, when he denied that the Old Testament proceeds from the same God as does the New; and three-fourths or more of the human race would not, to this very moment, be bereft, without fault of their own, of all knowledge of the Historic Christ and of every opportunity for definite incorporation into the Christian Church, since we dare not think that God has left this large majority of His children without any and every glimpse and opportunity of religious truth, moral goodness, and eternal hope. Yet such a recognition of some light and love everywhere involves no trace of levelling down, or even of levelling up; it is, in itself, without a trace of Indifferentism. For if some kinds or degrees of light are thus found everywhere, yet this light is held to vary immensely in different times and places, from soul to soul, and from one religious stage, group or body to another; the measure and culmination of this light is found in the deepest Christian and Catholic light and holiness; and, over and above the involuntary, sincere differences in degree, stage and kind, there are held to exist, also more or less everywhere, the differences caused by cowardice and opposition to the light,--cowardices and oppositions which are as certainly at work within the Christian and Catholic Church as they are amongst the most barbarous of Polytheists. I may well have failed adequately to combine these twin truths; yet only in some such, though more adequate apprehension and combination resides the hope for the future of our poor storm-tossed human race,--in a deep fervour without fanaticism, and a generous sympathy without indifference.