language of the five senses. A hard, "common-sense," labour-and-wages
religion, such as is consonant with the utilitarianism of a commercial
civilization, could never appeal to a temperament like Durtal's.

Doubtless Catholic Christianity admits of being apprehended under the
narrower and grosser aspect, which however inadequate and unworthy, is
not absolutely false. The Jews were suffered to believe not merely that
God rewards the just and punishes the wicked--which is eternally
true--but that He does so in this life, which is true only with
qualification; and that He rewards them with temporal prosperity and
adversity--which is hardly true at all. Catholic truth, in itself the
same, can only be received according to the recipient's capacity and
sensitiveness. What one age or country is alive to, another may be dead
to; nor can we pretend that here all is progress and no regress, unless
we are prepared to say that in no respect have we anything to learn from
the past. The Ignatian meditation on the "Kingdom of Christ" evoked
heroic response in an age impregnated with the sentiments of chivalry,
but to-day it needs to be adapted to a great extent, and some have
vainly hoped to gather grapes from a thistle by substituting a parable
drawn from some soul-stirring commercial enterprise--a colossal
speculation in cheese.

Whatever signs there may be of a reaction, yet the whole temper and
spirit of our age is unfavourable to that mysticism which is the very
choicest flower of the Catholic religion. The blame is not with the
seed, but with the soil. Even where least of all we should look for such
indifference, among those who have built up the sepulchres and shrines
of the great masters of mysticism, we sometimes observe a profound
distrust for what is esteemed an unpractical, unhealthy kind of piety,
while every preference is given to what is definite and tangible in the