But to living word is added the Spirit, the inspiration of the one divine Spirit in the communion of the faithful. The Holy Spirit alone gives our will the power and our understanding the light that we may be able to pass from the mere judgment of credibility to the unconditional affirmation of the mysteries of the faith, that is to true divine faith, and so come to the experience of Pentecost. The more closely the Catholic then gets into touch with his Church, not merely externally, but internally, with her prayer and sacrifice, with her word and sacrament, the more sensitive and attentive will he be to the inspiration of the divine Spirit in the community, the more vitally will he grasp the divine life that flows through the organism of the Church. For “in proportion as a man loves the Church, so has he the Holy Spirit” (S. Aug. “In ev. Joann.” xxxii, 8). And when he thinks and prays, suffers and strives with the living Church, then he experiences a broadening, deepening and fulfilling of his whole being. And so the logical certitude of his faith becomes progressively a psychological, living experience that it is the very Life of all life by which he is sustained, that verily, as St. Paul expresses this experience, “the Lord is a Spirit” (2 Cor. iii, 17). This certitude is a personal experience, the most personal experience that he has. He may delineate and describe it in rational language, though very crudely and imperfectly, but he cannot impart it to any other. For it is derived from that complete personal contact of his soul with the Spirit of Jesus that inspires the Christian community. But because it is a certitude that he has tested for himself, no man, no doubt, no ridicule can deprive him of it. Therefore, to be absolutely exact, I do not believe the Church, but the living God, who attests Himself to me in the Church. Nor is it I that believe, but the Holy Spirit that is in me. The Catholic grasps and affirms Jesus ultimately and decisively in the flowing life of His Church, in the Church as the mystical Body of Christ.

Here certainly lies the sharpest line of demarcation separating the faith of a Catholic from that of a Protestant, or rather, separating the Catholic’s faith from that purely rationalistic apprehension of Christ which is establishing itself among the disciples of the so-called critical theology.