Men were not yet perfect, he said; there ran in their veins the blood of men who for twenty centuries had been Christians....

There must be no despair; faith in man was of the very essence of religion, faith in man's best self, in what he would become, not in what at present he actually was.

They were at the beginning of the new religion, not in its maturity; there must be sourness in the young fruit.

...

Consider, too, the provocation! Remember the appalling crime that these Catholics had contemplated; they had set themselves to strike the new Faith in its very heart....
"My darling," he said, "men are not changed in an instant.