rags, she is only using her invariable economy. We know well the sort of
robe that befits her dignity, and no doubt it is this contrast that
makes the trial of her present humiliation more difficult for us to
bear.

We do not for a moment allow that the difference between bad taste and
good is merely relative, or that a language or art which is externally
vulgar can ever be the adequate and appropriate expression of the
Catholic religion, whose tendency when unimpeded is ever to refine and
purify. But it is perhaps another narrowness to suppose that a reform
can only be effected by a return to the past, to mediæval symbolism and
music and architecture. No effort of the kind has ever met with more
than seeming success. What is consciously imitated from the past is not
the same as that natural growth which it imitates, and which was as
congenial to those days as it is uncongenial to ours. It is all the
difference between the Mass ceremonial in a Ritualist church and in a
Catholic church--the historical sense is violated in one case and
satisfied in the other.

What is once really dead can never revive in the same form--at best we
get a cast from the dead face. No doubt the old music and the old
symbolism always will have a beauty of antiquity that can never belong
to the new; but it was not this beauty--the beauty of death, of autumn
leaves, that made them once popular, but the beauty of fresh green life
and flexibility. The effort to make antiquity popular is almost a
contradiction in terms. What we may hope for at most is an improvement
in the æsthetic tastes of the Catholic public which comes from freer and
healthier surroundings, from saner ideas and wider opportunities of
education and liberal culture. When they begin to speak a richer
language, the Church will take that language and find in it a fuller