Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/180

190 and he will believe that it ought to, and that it must be so. He evidently sees no other unity and other rule, but the mechanical. Catholics in general do not see any other, and what is worse, neither do many Protestants. But these latter have a different centre of gravity. Well, well! Let it stand, this mechanical unity and order, until its spiritual life becomes strong enough to burst the imprisoning husk, and, like the tree of the world—a new Ygdrasil—grow lofty and beautiful, a tree of life for all people under God's free heaven!

“People ought to believe in the Pope!” I cannot forget these words. They were spoken with such decision; with such entire conviction by the Pope himself that they deserve to be more closely considered. And so they shall be by me, not as a Protestant, but as a Catholic Christian, and therefore I will yet once more “ask the Pope,” not Pio Nono, but a greater than he, even the greatest and noblest who has occupied the Pontifical chair, he whom Roman Catholic Christianity designates Gregory the Great; I will ask him whether “people ought to believe the Pope,” as the infallible legislator and judge in spiritual question, in questions about what “people ought to believe and to teach,” and I shall be introduced to him not by Monsignore de Merode, but by the erudite and truth-loving historian, August Neander.

Mighty, in a different way to what it is now, was the Roman cure of souls, at the time when Gregory the First—the Great—became its head. All the increasing communities of Christendom, in Asia, Africa, and Europe, were gathered under his care he watched