only from outside and from a distance that you can judge of the result of the whole mechanism, and perceive that all is in place, and every item in the construction necessary.

IV. WHY DOES GOD PERMIT PAINS AND

MISERY TO EXIST?

Answer. In order to preserve and to educate individuals, nations and races. In the case of individuals pain is sent to warn them of what is injurious to their constitutions or against their natures. In the case of nations, misery is sent to teach them that their course is not characterized by justice and right. If it did not hurt the hands to burn or freeze them, who of us would grow up with a finger? If feet did not smart with abuse, they would be treated as shoes, worn out in childhood, and no hardy boy would have a foot left. If broken teeth did not ache, so long as walnuts have a shell, no child would be safe; the world would be full of toothless striplings. The pain of poverty and want, of ignorance, of disappointed ambition, of affections bereaved, of the accidents to individuals by flood and flame, to nations by wars, of the diseases which prey upon mankind, it all has this. meaning and this use. See with what scorpion whips poverty drives the Irishmen out of Ireland, forcing them to work and think. Not many cen

turies ago there was a famine in France every ten or twenty years. Whence came this famine? Men had fought each other instead of conquering the forces of nature; had raised soldiers instead of farmers. The famine warned the French of their error. It was a painful warning, but it sowed wheat. A little while ago there came the cholera, scaring the world. Men had been ignorantly violating some of the natnral conditions of bodily well-being. If we went on so, we should all perish, and the race die out. Men learned the lesson taught by the pain and suffering of that epidemic. The Board of Health opened sewers, whitewashed houses and swept the cholera out of many a town.

V. THERE IS NO ETERNITY OF PUNISHMENT.

To a

Answer. What do you mean by punishment? It is punishment to a man to be a beast. good, sensible, well-conducted man, the condition of a drunkard is one of misery. Yet to the drunkard there is no ambition to taste the joys of respectability or of good sense. A coarse, brutal nature can not appreciate, or care to appreciate, the refined pleasures derived from art and literature. A street drab with no modesty, nor cleanliness, and with only the animal lusts, and a craving for drink has no ambition to live the life of a Sister of Mercy. Now to a highly refined mind, the coarse and

brutal nature is awful in its loathsomeness. To the pure and virgin soul full of heavenly aspirations, the life of a street drab is hell. So, may be, the conditions hereafter will be relative. The characters we hold to be fixed, the aspirations to be determined, the soul to be moulded, in this life. The characters, the aspirations, the souls will be hereafter what they have been made here. There is no reason to suppose that ten thousand years hence the coarse, brute nature would be more appreciative of the beauty of heaven than it is now; nor that the drab will be at all more sensitive to the exquisite rapture of heavenly love than she is at the present moment. By the eternity of punishment it is quite possible to understand nothing more than the eternity of the condition reached by the soul in its period of growth on earth. And again, hell, as we understand it, is a condition of negations, of absence of God, of light, of 'beauty, of spirituality. Those who are indifferent to God here will hardly miss Him through eternity, those who here love darkness rather than light, would hardly find joy in eternal day; those who have no sense of the beautiful here, would only be bored by the beauty of heaven; those who are utterly sensual would find the service of the temple above insufferably tedious.

VI. ONE RELIGION IS AS GOOD AS ANOTHER.

Answer. All religions are good, in so far that they are better than none. "The conscience" said Tertullian, "is instinctively Christian," and so all religions contain some of the rudiments of Christianity. The nearer they approach the truth the better they are. But one religion is not as good as another, any more that the eyes of a blind man, of a purblind, a short-sighted, and a long-sighted man are equally good. Now consider. There is but One God; is it not reasonable therefore that the Truth should be One? Is it not also a fact that all the world is liable to fall into the most grievous errors in matters of faith? Is it not therefore reasonable that God, who is all good, should reveal to man the Truth, so that he may grasp if he choose? Now God has actually done so. That Truth is Christianity. But you say, and justly, that there are as many differences among Christians as there are among heathens. Does not this shew that unless one of these Faiths be the Truth, God's revelation was imperfect? Now consider these facts. Throughout the world, the whole of the Eastern Church, which spreads from the Baltic to the Pacific, the Armenian Church, the Roman Church, the English Church, all hold the same Truth, the same doctrines and the same sacraments. Where one of these branches of the Catholic

Church believes a little more than the others it is manifestly wrong, where one believes a little less than the others it is also manifestly wrong, but there is a concensus of Faith in the articles of the Creed and in Catholic dogma from the vast bulk of Christendom. Those who do not belong to these branches of the Catholic Church are Protestants, and so far from agreeing on any one point, the seventy or a hundred sects into which Protestantism is divided differ on every item of belief. Catholicism is Yes; Protestantism is No.

If we

want to find what Christianity is we must ask the positive witness to the Faith of Christ, and not the negative one. Bad coin proves the existence of good coin, but we cannot tell the sterling value of gold or silver from analysis of bad coin, we must ascertain it by examining that which is good and

current.

Again, the Catholic Faith has lasted eighteen hundred and odd years, unaltered, and Protestantism has lasted only three hundred, and is already fallen into confusion. Catholicism is like Jerusalem, which is at unity in itself; but Protestantism is like Babel, confusion.

Consequently we have reason to conjecture, from common sense, that the Catholic Faith is the True Religion founded by God.