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Paradoxes of Catholicism by Robert Hugh Benson
page 25 of 115 (21%)
her own ambition into the _liberty of the poor and the children of
God!"_

(ii) In a word, then, the Church is too worldly to be the Church of
Christ! _You cannot serve God and Mammon_. Yet in another mood our
critic will tell us that we are too otherworldly to be the Church of
Christ. "The chief charge I have against Catholicism," says such a man,
"is that the Church is too unpractical. If she were truly the Church of
Jesus Christ, she would surely imitate Him better in that which, after
all, was the mark of His highest Divinity--namely in His Humanity
towards men. Christ did not come into the world to preach metaphysics
and talk forever of a heaven that is to come; He came rather to attend
to men's simplest needs, _to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked_, to
reform society on better lines. It was not by His dogma that He won
men's hearts; it was by His simple, natural sympathy with their common
needs. He came, in a word, to make the best of this world, to use the
elements that lay ready to His hand, to sanctify all the plain things of
earth with which He came in contact.

"These otherworldly Catholics, then, are too much apart from common life
and common needs. Their dogmas and their aspirations and their
metaphysics are useless to a world which wants bread. Let them act more
and dream less! Let them show, for example, by the prosperity of
Catholic countries that Catholicism is practical and not a vision. Let
them preach less and philanthropize more. Let them show that they have
the key to this world's progress, and perhaps we will listen more
patiently to their claim to hold the key to the world that is to come!"

But, surely, this is a little hard upon Catholics! When we make
ourselves at home in this world, we are informed that Jesus Christ _had
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