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The Victory of Love.
By the Rt. Rev. J. Lancaster Spalding, D.D.

HATEVER brings us into personal relations with wider worlds, with larger and more enduring life, gives us a sense of freedom and joy; for we are the prisoners of faith, hope and love, and are driven to make ceaseless appeal to them to enlarge the confining walls; to constitute us, if so it may be, dwellers in a boundless universe, where truth and beauty and goodness are infinite; where what uplifts and deifies is eternal; where, ceasing to be the slaves of animal needs, we are made citizens of a spiritual kingdom and have divine leisure to live for and in the soul. Now, more than anything else, religion is able to realize for us these ideals; to diffuse itself through our whole being; to level the hills and fill the valleys, to bridge the chasms and throw assuring light into the abysses of doubt and despair; to make us know and feel that God is near, that He is our father and has the will to save. So long, then, as human nature is human nature religion shall draw and hold men, and without it nor wealth, nor position, nor pleasure, nor love can redeem them from the sense of the vanity and nothingness of existence. The things of time are apparent and relative; the absolute reality, the power within and above the whole, religion, and religion alone, reveals.

The efficacy, therefore, of an organization to keep pure religious faith alive and active is the highest test of its worth, and the Catholic Church when tried by this test stands pre-eminent. Her power to speak to the mind, the heart, the imagination, the whole man, is proclaimed and dreaded by her enemies; while those who believe in her are stirred to tender and grateful thoughts at the mention of the name of her whom they call Mother. She is dear to them for a thousand reasons. Has she not filled the earth with memorials of the soul's trust in God? Who has entered her solemn cathedrals and not heard whisperings from higher worlds? Her

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