comes the command, _He that hath not, let him sell his cloak and buy a
sword,_, for here comes the line between the Divine and the Human; let
all personal possessions go, all merely natural rights and claims be
yielded, and let a sword take their place. For here is a matter that
must be _resisted, even unto blood_.

The Catholic Church then is, and always will be, _violent_ and
intransigeant when the rights of God are in question. She will be
absolutely ruthless, for example, towards heresy, for heresy affects not
personal matters on which Charity may yield, but a Divine right on which
there must be no yielding. Yet, simultaneously, she will be infinitely
kind towards the heretic, since a thousand human motives and
circumstances may come in and modify his responsibility. At a word of
repentance she will readmit his person into her treasury of souls, but
not his heresy into her treasury of wisdom; she will strike his name
eagerly and freely from her black list of the rebellious, but not his
book from the pages of her Index. She exhibits meekness towards him and
_violence_ towards his error; since he is human, but her Truth is
Divine.

It is, then, from a modern confusion of thought with regard to the
realms of the Divine and the Human that the amazing inability arises, on
the world's part, to understand the respective principles on which the
Catholic Church acts in these two and utterly separate departments. The
world considers it reasonable for a country to defend its material
possessions by the sword, but intolerant and unreasonable for the Church
to condemn, _resisting even unto blood_, principles which she considers
erroneous or false. The Church, on the other hand, urges her children
again and again to yield rather than to fight when merely material
possessions are at stake, since Charity permits and sometimes even