Once more: the variety of the religious orders, congregations, institutes, existing in the church, and marked by her approval, afford a further proof of her adaptation to the various needs and characters of men. The system which recognizes the sanctity of marriage by elevating it to the rank of a sacrament proclaims also the superiority of the "best part" chosen by Mary, "which shall not be taken from her;" and, within this first great principle of classification among the church's children, separating between the secular and the religious life, and strictly subjective in the sense in which the word has here been used, we find an almost endless diversity of what are technically called "religions." The cloistered and the uncloistered; and among the former, the eremitic and the conventual, with their subdivisions; among the latter, a devotion special and concentrated upon every malady to which man is heir. Brothers of the hospitals, brothers of Christian doctrine, communities devoted to the leper, the lunatic, the ordinary sick, the hopelessly diseased, the poor as such, the young, the orphan, the ignorant, the upper classes, the middle rank, the homeless pauper, the pilgrim, the penitent, the convict, the galley-slave, the felon condemned to die.
This very glory of the King's daughter, her beauty in the variety with which she is surrounded, the subjective provisions she makes for each of her children called to religion, has been made by writers of more than common shallowness an argument against her unity. It is difficult to treat with gravity a distortion of the truth so perverse. "Look," says a platform orator—"look at the divisions of the Church of Rome. She taunts us with our dissensions. It is true, we have our high church, and our low, and our broad; there are those amongst us who hold the sacramental principle, and those who deny it. But Rome, too, has her divisions, as deep and as fundamental. Has she not her Franciscans and her Dominicans, her Benedictines and her Seculars, her Jesuits, and I know not who besides? Have not her religious orders and her secular canons, in times past, carved grotesque caricatures of each other in the gargoyles and misereres of their respective churches? And yet, with her characteristic effrontery, she dares to tell us that she is one!"
It was well answered. You might with equal reason argue that an army was not one, not one in its operations and campaign, nor moving at the nod of one commander, because it had its several branches and "arms" of the service; its light horse, troops of the line, skirmishers, cavalry for the charge, heavy artillery. Rather, the essential unity of the whole is all the more demonstrated by the distinct lines and modes of operation belonging to each department. Herodotus is at much pains to detail the different nationalities and customs of warfare in the army of Xerxes before he proceeds to narrate their combined descent upon Greece. And to return to our thesis: the objective unity of the religious orders throughout the church's long life, in all that ever concerned her faith and essential teaching, has been enhanced, made conspicuous, and shown to be supernatural, by their acknowledged subjective diversity in much beside.
But we are not here in need of a Catholic apologist. A vivid and popular writer, if not of history, yet of widely accepted historical romance, had the intelligence to perceive this very characteristic of the church. He has thrown no little power into developing the truth, that the Catholic system is thus universally subjective, has a place for every one, rejects none of earth's children, and can retain them, find them employment, and communicate to them happiness, within the ample breadth of her unity.
He describes the merely local characters of the Church of England, and her consequent inability to make way in foreign missions. He has a fling at what he calls the polity of the Church of Rome as the very masterpiece of human wisdom. It is, he says, a system of tactics to be regarded with reluctant admiration. Then more particularly: "She thoroughly understands, what no other church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts. In some sects, particularly in infant sects, enthusiasm is suffered to be rampant. In other sects, particularly in sects long established and richly endowed, it is regarded with aversion. The Catholic Church neither submits to enthusiasm nor proscribes it, but uses it. She considers it as a great moving force, which in itself, like the muscular powers of a fine horse, is neither good nor evil, but which may be so directed as to produce great good or great evil, and she assumes the direction to herself. … She knows that, where religious feelings have obtained the complete empire of the mind, they impart a strange energy, that they raise man above the dominion of pain and pleasure, that obloquy becomes glory. She knows that a person in this state of enthusiasm is no object of contempt. He may be vulgar, ignorant, visionary, extravagant; but he will do and suffer things which it is for her interest that somebody should do and suffer. She accordingly enlists him in her service, assigns to him some forlorn hope, and sends him forth with her benedictions and her applause."
Then, after showing how the Anglican system expels from itself the enthusiasm it can neither wield nor control, he proceeds to draw his contrast:
"Far different is the policy of Rome. The ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy, and, whatever the polite and learned may think, a most dangerous enemy, the Catholic Church makes a champion. She bids him nurse his beard, covers him with a gown and hood of coarse, dark stuff, ties a rope round his waist, and sends him forth to teach in her name. He costs her nothing. He takes not a ducat away from the resources of her beneficed clergy. He lives by the alms of those who respect his spiritual character and are grateful for his instructions. He preaches not exactly in the style of Massillon, but in a way which moves the passions of uneducated hearers; and all his influence is employed to strengthen the church of which he is a minister. To that church he becomes as strongly attached as any of the cardinals whose scarlet carriages and liveries crowd the entrance of the palace on the Quirinal. In this way the Church of Rome unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent. With the utmost pomp of a dominant hierarchy above, she has all the energy of the voluntary system below. It would be easy to mention very recent instances in which the hearts of hundreds of thousands, estranged from her by the selfishness, sloth, and cowardice of the beneficed clergy, have been brought back by the zeal of the begging friars. At Rome the Countess of Huntingdon would have a place in the calendar as St. Sabina, and Mrs. Fry would be foundress and first superior of the blessed order of Sisters of the Gaols. Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford: he is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome: he is certain to be the first general of a new society devoted to the interests and honor of the church. Place Johanna Southcote at Rome: she founds an order of barefooted Carmelites, every one of whom is ready to suffer martyrdom for the church; a solemn service is consecrated to her memory; and her statue, placed over the holy water, strikes the eye of every stranger who enters St. Peter's."
Such thoughts as I have endeavored to suggest will not be vain, if they lead us to recognize the attributes and credentials of the church in her mission to the world, not less in the comparison of part with part among her manifestations, than in the harmony of the whole. She is as divine, as Catholic, as faithful to her trust, and as unerring in her functions, in the subjective character of her devotions, as in the objectivity of her teaching. Nothing surely can be more attractive to the imagination, more winning to the heart, or more persuasive to the will than the condescension and personal care of that which is all the while lofty in its attributes and authoritative in its claims and power. The church is a mother while she is a queen, and we her children no less than her subjects and disciples. She teaches us to pray while she commands us to believe; and gives a personal experience of her science in the one, while affording abundant proof of her embassy and her inerrancy in the other. Thus, while I am enlightened by her truth, I am fostered by her charity. The need of which I am conscious in myself, das Ich, for something on which to feed the faculty within me for supernatural love and personal devotion, is as completely met and fulfilled as any craving for a truth above myself, das nicht Ich, which comes down to me from heaven that it may raise me thither. "Descendit" says St. Augustine, "misericordia, ut ascendat miseria."