Carry out the
Church system; that's the thing--all laid down by rule and method. A man
has but to work out that--and it's the only one for the lower classes I'm
convinced."
"Strange," I said, "that they have from the first been so little of that
opinion, that every attempt to enforce it, for the last three hundred
years, has ended either in persecution or revolution."
"Ah! that was all those vile puritans' fault. They wouldn't give the Church
a chance of showing her powers."
"What! not when she had it all her own way, during the whole eighteenth
century?"
"Ah! but things are very different now. The clergy are awakened now to the
real beauty of the Catholic machinery; and you have no notion how much is
doing in church-building and schools, and societies of every sort and kind.
It is quite incredible what is being done now for the lower orders by the
Church."
"I believe," I said, "that the clergy are exceedingly improved; and I
believe, too, that the men to whom they owe all their improvement are the
Wesleys and Whitfields--in short, the very men whom they drove one by one
out of the Church, from persecution or disgust.
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