the world if she desires to live in it.

And this comment has been made upon her actions in every age. She
condemned Arius, when a little compromise might surely have been found;
and lost half her children. She condemned Luther and lost Germany;
Elizabeth, and lost England. At every crisis she has made the wrong
choice, she has yielded when she should have resisted, resisted when she
should have yielded. The wonder is that she survives at all.

Yes, that is the wonder. _As dying, behold she lives_!

II. The answer of course is easy. It is that she simply does not desire
the kind of life which the world reckons alone to be life. To her that
is not life at all. She desires of course to survive as a human society,
and she is assured that she always shall so survive. Yet it is not on
the ordinary terms of ordinary society that she desires survival. It is
not a _natural_ life of which she is ambitious, a life that draws its
strength from human conditions and human environment, a life, therefore,
that waxes and wanes with those human conditions and ultimately meets
their fate, but a _supernatural_ life that draws its strength from God.
And she recognizes, as one of the most fundamental paradoxes of all,
that such a life can be gained and held only through what the world
calls "death."

She does not, then, want merely the life of a prosperous human state,
whether monarchy or republic. There are times indeed in her history when
such an accompaniment to her real existence is useful to her
effectiveness; and she has, of course, the right, as have other
societies, to earthly dominions that may have been won and presented to
her by her children. Or through her ministers, as in Paraguay, she may