of Him Who, _when He was reviled, reviled not again;_ of Him Who bade
men to _learn of Him, for He was meek and lowly of heart_, and so _find
rest to their souls?_

Here, then, is the Paradox, and here are two characteristics of the
Catholic Church: that she is at once too meek and too self-assertive,
too gentle and too violent. It is a paradox exactly echoed by our Divine
Lord Himself, Who in the Upper Chamber bade His disciples who _had no
sword_ to _sell their cloaks and buy them_, and Who yet, in the garden
of Gethsemane, commanded the one disciple who had taken Him at His word
to _put up the sword into its sheath_, telling him that _they who took
the sword should perish by it_. It is echoed yet again in His action,
first in taking the scourge into His own Hand, in the temple courts, and
then in baring His shoulders to that same scourge in the hands of
others. How, then, is this Paradox to be reconciled?

II. The Church, let us remind ourselves again, is both Human and Divine.

(i) She consists of human persons, and those persons are attached both
to one another and to the world outside by a perfectly balanced system
of human rights known as the Law of Justice. This Law of Justice, though
coming indeed from God, is, in a sense, natural and human; it exists to
some extent in all societies, as well as being closely defined and
worked out in the Old Law given on Sinai. It is a Law which men could
have worked out, at any rate in its main principles, by the light of
reason only, unaided by Revelation, and it is a Law, further, so
fundamental that no Revelation could conceivably ever outrage or set it
aside.

At the coming of Christ into the world, however, Supernatural Charity