It leaves wholly unaccounted for the prodigious host of monstrous or imperfect organisms, and the appalling law of merciless and incessant destruction.
To us this is the familiar discussion of the day.

But let us return to the starting-point of this chapter.

In France a hundred and twenty years ago it was the first opening of a decisive breach in the walls that had sheltered the men of Western Europe against outer desolation for some fifteen centuries or more.

The completeness of Catholicism, as a self-containing system of life and thought, is now harder for Protestants or Sceptics to realise, than any other fact in the whole history of human society.

Catholicism was not only an institution, nor only a religious faith; it was also a philosophy and a systematised theory of the universe.