82 THE LIGHT OF DAY 



the church is founded, namely, the assumption of 

 an anthropomorphic God, an Infinite Person, the cre- 

 ator and upholder of all things, whose plans with 

 reference to man have not gone smoothly, hut have 

 been sadly deranged and frustrated by man himself 

 through what we call sin, so that the creature is 

 hopelessly estranged from the creator, and so on 

 through the rest of the theological formula, — if we 

 start with this assumption, all the rest comes easy : 

 faith and revelation are reasonable, the theory of 

 the Christ and the atonement is reasonable, and 

 with one or two more assumptions, which Cardinal 

 Newman readily makes, the Catholic church becomes 

 the very child and servant of reason. It is reason- 

 able that this Infinite Person, who is not here upon 

 earth, but in heaven, should want a representative, 

 a vicar, in this world, to look after the well-being 

 of his children, etc., and what more reasonable than 

 that the great mother church, the church which the 

 apostles founded, should be that go-between, that re- 

 presentative ? The Protestant churches are all more 

 or less compromises with the devil, that is, with 

 reason, with sense, with the natural man ; but the 

 Catholic church makes no compromises with the indi- 

 vidual ; it stands for authority. In fact, out of the 

 purely human or anthropomorphic conception of the 

 universe upon which our theology is based, it arises 

 as the inevitable result. If your assumption at one 

 end of the Christian scheme is reasonable, your 

 acceptance of the Catholic church at the other is 

 equally so. If the universe is an institution, a 



