Generous contentment

To a romantic imaginative mind at least, the Roman claims stand out in a very obvious manner, and the English deficiences are quite confessed and palpable. "Yours," they will tell us, "undeniably is the poor, the homely, the unattractive side of the alternative. Who would wish, if he could choose, to be a member of a smaller and comparatively disunited body, instead of the largest and most compact of Christian communities; to be doubtful where others feel certain? Who would not have God's Saints, and their miracles, disclosed to him, rather than regard them as so many unrevealed mysteries? Who would not possess rather than want an entire and definite system of doctrine, and a poetical ritual, extending through all parts of life? Who, if he could help it, would acknowledge such as the Tudor monarchs and their favourites, as framers in any sense of the religious system he lives under?" In these and many more instances, which Roman Catholics are never tired of alleging, let it be granted that we stand, prima facie, in a position more or less humiliating: I say, that to acquiesce in it, because it is providentially our own position, - to be dutiful and loyal amid the full consciousness of it, - savours of the same kind of generous contentment, as the not being ashamed of lowly parentage, nor unloving towards a dull, monotonous home.

John Keble, 1792-1866