Preface

By His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster

The author of this book has already merited well of the Catholic public by his well-known work, Is One Religion as Good as Another. In the present volume he has followed up the lines of reasoning laid down so clearly in the former, and has addressed himself to a further inquiry, as to the qualities which, by the very terms of her origin and object, must enter into the nature of the one and only true Church of Christ.

In working out the solution of this problem—the problem of all problems for every sincere seeker after Christian truth—Father MacLaughlin has been happily inspired to carry his readers above the ordinary level of everyday controversies, and to seek the necessary type of the Church in the Divine Mind of Her Founder.

Studied in this, the fountain head of light, the Church of Christ appears in all the beauty of Her Divine ideal, “Parata sicut sponsa ornata Viro suo,” and all such evasions as “branch theories” and “national autonomies,” and the other mere working-compromises which veil their dogmatic helplessness under the plea of “comprehensiveness,” stand revealed in the pitiable poverty of their purely human character.

Those who follow intently the clue to the solution, which is here presented to them, can hardly fail to realise the fundamental difference which must for ever lie between an authoritative Church in which the nations are summoned to submit themselves unreservedly to the mind of Christ, and the various non-Catholic systems in which, inversely, Christianity is taken piece-meal and adapted to suit the wishes and the wants of nations or of individuals.

I wish every blessing to the author and to the readers of this work, and feel sure where so much has been zealously done to plant and to water, God will not fail to give the increase.

ARCHBISHOP’S HOUSE, WESTMINSTER, S.W.
Feast of St. Edmund,
16th November, 1900.