to wait till she was strong enough to alter them and use them without
fear of scandal and misinterpretation.

The Church is many-tongued; but though she can deliver her message in
any language, yet she is not for that reason independent of language in
general. There is no way to the human ear and heart but through language
of some kind or another. It is not her mission to teach languages, but
to use the languages she finds to hand for the expression of the truths,
the facts, the concrete realities to which her dogmas point. This does
not deny that one language may not be more flexible, more graphic than
any other, more apt to express the facts of Heaven as well as those of
earth. It only denies that any one is absolutely and exclusively the
best.

It is no very great violence to include rhetoric, music, painting,
sculpture, architecture, ritual, and every form of decorative art in the
category of language and to bring them under the same general laws,
since even philosophy may to a large extent be treated in the same way.
Christ has not commissioned His Church to teach science or philosophy,
nor has He given her an infallible _magisterium_ in matters of fine art.
She uses what she finds in use and endeavours with the imperfect
implements, the limited colours, the coarse materials at her disposal to
make the picture of Christ and His truth stand out as faithful to
reality as possible; and--to press the illustration somewhat crudely--as
what is rightly black, in a study in black and white, may be quite
wrongly black in polychrome; so what the Church approves according to
one convention, she may condemn according to another. May we not apply
to her what Durtal says of our Lady: "She seems to have come under the
semblance of every race known to the middle ages; black as an African,
tawny as a Mongolian;"--"she unveils herself to the children of the soil