Excerpt from Discourses and Essays Elsewhere we have spoken of the charge brought against the Church, not by her more reputable opponents, of her inferior morality. We venture to believe that no single human being who ever considered her claims, with the faintest genuine intention of submitting to her, should he find those claims to rest on justice and right reason, has ever been decided against submission by a frank conviction that in becoming a Catholic he would be accepting a lower rule of ethics. No student of her history and of that of the world, we are firmly convinced, has ever failed to arrive at the conclusion that her stand has consistently been on the side of good. Her vicissitudes have been great, her trials very many; and they would have been much less had she held the easy principles, the convenient laxity, the accommodating readiness to sacrifice justice for temporal, or selfish, advantage with which the ignorant and the vulgar-witted have credited her. In history she is seen, time and again, at variance with the mighty. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.