And ever since, St. Peter and his successors have held the keys of
Heaven and Hell, with power to loose and bind. What? you exclaim, were
the Keys of Heaven and Hell entrusted to even those Popes who lived
sinful lives and brought disgrace on the name of religion? Yes. To them
and to no others in their day. Whatever their lives may have been at
other moments, when they were loosing and binding they were acting for
St. Peter, who stood behind them, and behind St. Peter stood Jesus
Christ.
Such in brief was the sermon delivered that Sunday evening to the
faithful in Westminster Cathedral by one of the wittiest men now living
and one of the cleverest young men who ever came down from Oxford with
the assurance of a great career before them.
How is it that he has come to such a pass?
I feel that he is in part whistling to keep up his courage, but in chief
forcing himself to utter an extreme of traditional belief in order to
destroy the last vestige in his mind of a free intellectual existence.
Auto-suggestion has a power of which we only begin to know the first
movements.
The man who has said that he would not choose as the battleground of the
Christian religion either "the credibility of Judges or the edibility of
Jonah," the man who is blest with an unusual sense of humour and
intellectual subtlety of a rare order, is here found preaching a
theology which is fast being rejected by the students of Barcelona and
is being questioned even by the peasants of Ireland.
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