Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/50

40 condition of the Church Catholic and Universal. I smell something of Christian Socialism in the business, which is not much in my line, but it is what attracts his sister. He regards Catholicism as the one hope for religion and order in the future—as the one effective defence against infidelity and anarchism. But the Church cannot triumph unless it assimilates modern science, and keeps its hold on the people. It must be scientific and democratic. One of the first articles of the Count's creed is death to Scholasticism, and there I'm partly with him. He is to bring the seminaries up to date in historical criticism, and there I say &apos;chi va piano va sano,' for after all it is a science in its infancy. But then, Miss Fairfax, he is the most unpractical man on the face of the earth, and the most amazingly self-confident. Here's a business that is to affect part of the inhabitants of every spot on the globe. It is no mere local or national or even European controversy, but the handling of the intellectual life of the mightiest religious polity the world has ever seen. Take it in his own favourite way, and call it the largest, the deepest, the widest expression of the religion of the human race. And to him, all he wants done is so perfectly simple. He knows so little of human nature; he has no philosophy of action, he leaves everything to ideas. Teach the young priests philosophy up to date, shake the Vatican like a bottle of medicine till you get the right things at the top, and you will have a Catholic Church made in Germany, and fit, according to him, to guide and to embody the thought of the human race. Mind you, all the same, the man has so much force, so much power of infectious thought, that it is amazingly interesting to watch him and to see what will come of him. I conclude that you don't know his story from the way you speak."

"No, indeed, I don't."

"Well, he is now, I suppose, forty-five. About fifteen years ago he came to the front as a politician in Paris,