Leaves from a Madeira Garden 



firmly on a commercial basis, to be judged 

 by results, as a sound dividend-paying con- 

 cern. 



Such considerations, and others, may lead 

 some of us, trained in the traditional horror of 

 the Scarlet Woman, to ask ourselves whether 

 in truth the Roman Catholic Church is always 

 in the wrong ; whether she is really, as our 

 forbears honestly believed, the enemy of the 

 human race. She is, as I have suggested, the 

 main safeguard of the race's future among 

 the peoples that call her mother. And she is 

 perhaps the chief sanctuary in Europe of that 

 spiritual side of human nature, which in the 

 intoxication of our material progress we are 

 more and more tending to ignore. Many who 

 have no desire to subscribe to her doctrines, 

 who distrust her dominance, may yet view not 

 without sympathy the greatness of her ideals, 

 the coherence of her ethical system, the whole- 

 hearted devotion of her servants, her practical 

 wisdom in dealing with human weakness. To 

 her aesthetic charm, to the splendour of her 

 world-wide pretensions, to the glamour of her 

 hoary antiquity, few can be wholly insensible ; 

 is she not the one unbroken link connecting 



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