With this statement of the case before us, let me introduce the subject with a little parable, If Alfred the Great, who reigned in England 2 thousand years ago, were to come back to London today, do you think he would recognize his old capital? What he knew as a fair-sized country town is today a vast world city, with more inhabitants than were to be found in his whole kingdom. There is but one thing in London today which King Alfred would. recognize. Let him enter a Catholic Church during, Mass and immediate! he at home;—everything is exactly as he knew it in the days when he himself was able to assist at Mass every morning and kneel at the altar rails to receive the same Holy Communion as the Catholics of today. For you must remember those were the' good old days in England, when even the Kig was free to be a Catholic; and Alfred, if I may pay a tribute to his memory, was a very good Catholic indeed. Such was the Catholic Church a thousand years ago, for what we say of the Mass is true of every other Catholic doctrine.
History might well be' termed a study of differences. Nation differs from nation in everything; differences in language, in customs, in government, in temperament If there is one lesson to be learned from the state of the world today, it is that men cannot agree. Against this evi ent fact we have the fact, equally evident and far more striking, of the complete unity of the Catholic Church. Nineteen centuries of change have left her unchanged: unity of belief, unity of worship, of literature, the 9f Practice, of. teaching, of government. The faith of the Apostles of the first century is the faith of Augustine in the fourth, of Alfred in the tenth, of Dante in the thirteenth, of Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth—the faith of three hundred million people throughout the world today.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.