possesses and wants to illustrate and convey; but Mrs. Wilfrid Ward has,
we think, risen above this weakness very notably, and should accordingly
merit greater attention.

It may well be that this judicial impartiality may meet with its usual
reward of pleasing neither side altogether. Some will complain that she
brings no idealizing love to her subject, and does little to bring out
the greatness and glory of her religion. Yet this would be a hasty and
ill-judging criticism; for our faith is no less to be commended for the
restraint it exercises over the multitude of ordinary men and women,
than for the effect it produces in souls of a naturally heroic type.
That it should bring a certain largeness into the smallest life, that it
should impart a strange stability to a naturally unstable and frivolous
character; that it should check the worldly-minded with a sense of the
superior claims of the other world--all this impresses us, if not with
the sublimity or mystic beauty, at least with the solid reality and
penetrating power of the Catholic faith.

The most loyal and deep-seated love needs not to shut its eyes to all
defects and limitations, but can face them unchilled; and similarly
there is often more faith and reverence and quiet enthusiasm in this
seemingly cold and critical attitude towards the cause or party we love,
than in the extravagant idealism that depends for its maintenance on an
ignoring of things as they are.

Nothing perhaps is more unintelligible to the Protestant critic of
Catholicism, nothing more needs to be brought out prominently, than the
firm hold our religion can exercise over souls that are naturally
irreligious.