CHAPTER LII
"You know, my dear Pontifex," said Pryer to him, some few weeks after
Ernest had become acquainted with him, when the two were taking a
constitutional one day in Kensington Gardens, "You know, my dear
Pontifex, it is all very well to quarrel with Rome, but Rome has reduced
the treatment of the human soul to a science, while our own Church,
though so much purer in many respects, has no organised system either of
diagnosis or pathology--I mean, of course, spiritual diagnosis and
spiritual pathology. Our Church does not prescribe remedies upon any
settled system, and, what is still worse, even when her physicians have
according to their lights ascertained the disease and pointed out the
remedy, she has no discipline which will ensure its being actually
applied. If our patients do not choose to do as we tell them, we cannot
make them. Perhaps really under all the circumstances this is as well,
for we are spiritually mere horse doctors as compared with the Roman
priesthood, nor can we hope to make much headway against the sin and
misery that surround us, till we return in some respects to the practice
of our forefathers and of the greater part of Christendom.
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