core of faith and fear under a cortex of worldliness and frivolity; that
religion should have such a hold on one so entirely irreligious by
nature, is something quite inconceivable to a mind like, let us say,
Mrs. Humphrey Ward's; and yet absolutely intelligible to the ordinary
Catholic.

The Church to us, is not what it is to the Protestant--a sort of pasture
land in which we are at liberty to browse if we are piously disposed. It
is not merely a convenient environment for the development of the
religious faculty. She stands to us in the relation of shepherd, with a
more than parental authority to feed and train our souls through infancy
to maturity; that is, from the time when we do not know or like what is
good for us, to the time when we begin to appreciate and spontaneously
follow her directions. Just then as a child, however naturally
recalcitrant and ill-disposed, retains a certain fundamental goodness
and root of recovery so long as it acknowledges and obeys the authority
of its father and mother; so the ordinary unreligious Catholic, who has
been brought up to believe in the divine authority of the Church, finds
therein all the protection that obedience offers to those who are
incapable of self-government. "In Madge's eyes the woman who married an
innocent divorcee was no more than his mistress." Had Madge been a pious
Protestant she naturally might have examined the question of divorce on
its own merits; she might have weighed the pros and cons of the problem;
she might have consulted God in prayer, and have listened to this
clergyman on one side; and to that, on the other: but eventually she
would have been thrown upon herself; she would have had no one whose
decision she was bound to obey. But wild and lawless as she is, yet
being a Catholic there is one voice on earth which she fears to
disbelieve or disobey. Looked at even from a human standpoint, the
consensus of a world-wide, ancient, organized society like the Roman