The World's Debt to the Catholic Church

Christ came to give men life and give it more abundantly--the life of the spirit. He went around doing good for mankind and above all curing the ills of the body, but his Evangel, His message of good tidings, was for the spirit of man. The Church that He founded then must represent and foster and carry on the life of the spirit, that life of faith in an origin and a destiny above the natural which lifts men above the sordid cares of everyday existence, and her greatest representatives should be those men and women who are so spiritually minded that all subsequent generations think of them quite apart from what they have accomplished with their minds or their bodies.

Professor Osler in his lecture on Immortality, the Ingersoll lecture of 1904, emphasized the fact that the leaders of men have been "children of the light, children of the spirit whose ways often were foolishness to the children of this world, --mystics, idealists, with no strong reason for the faith that is in them, yet they compel admiration and imitation by the character of the life they lead and the beneficence of the influence they exert." "To them it is given to _know_ the mysteries.". "The heroic devotion of a St. Francis or a St. Teresa [Note 35]. do more to keep alive among men a belief in immortality than all the preaching in the world." [Note 36] Osler quoted Cardinal Newman's University sermon, "Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth," in which that profound thinker had said, "The attraction exerted by conscious holiness is of an urgent and irresistible nature; it persuades the weak, the timid, the wavering and the inquiring; it draws forth the affection and loyalty of all who are in a measure like-minded; and over the thoughtless or perverse multitude it exercises a sovereign compulsory sway, bidding them fear and keep silence on the ground of its own right divine to rule them."