Whatever signs there may be of a reaction, yet the whole temper and spirit of our age is unfavourable to that mysticism which is the very choicest flower of the Catholic religion. The blame is not with the seed, but with the soil. Even where least of all we should look for such indifference, among those who have built up the sepulchres and shrines of the great masters of mysticism, we sometimes observe a profound distrust for what is esteemed an unpractical, unhealthy kind of piety, while every preference is given to what is definite and tangible in the way of little methods and industries, multitudinous practices, lucrative prayers, in a word, to what a critic already quoted describes as _les petitesses des cerveaux étroits et les anguleuses routines_. [3] It is one of the narrownesses of Durtal himself to ascribe all this to the wilful perversity of a person or persons unknown, and not to see in it the inevitable result of the vulgarizing tendency of modern life upon the masses. Things being as they are, surely it is better that the Church should do the little she can than do nothing at all. The "meditative mind" is incompatible with the rush and worry of a busy life, especially where educational methods substitute information for reflection, and so kill the habit, and eventually the faculty, of thought in so many cases. But if the higher prayer is impossible, the lower is possible and profitable. Again, if the liturgical sense has in a great measure become extinct among the faithful owing to the unavoidable disuse of the public celebration of the Church's worship, it is well that they should be allowed devotions accommodated to their limited capacity. As the Church would never dream of expecting a keen sympathy with her higher dogmas, her mystical piety, her artistic symbolism, her transcendent liturgy, on the part of a newly-converted tribe of savages, so neither is she impatient with the civilized Philistine, but is willing to speak to him in a language all his own, hoping indeed to tune his tongue one day to something less uncouth. None can sympathize more cordially than the writer does with Durtal in his horror of unauthorized devotions, of insufferable vernacular litanies, of nerveless and sickly hymns, of interminable "acts of consecration" void of a single definite idea, more especially when these things are brought into the very sanctuary itself, with stole and cope and every apparent endeavour to fix the responsibility on the Universal Church. But if the Church is willing to go in rags to save those who are in rags, she is only using her invariable economy. We know well the sort of robe that befits her dignity, and no doubt it is this contrast that makes the trial of her present humiliation more difficult for us to bear.