Now, the Catholic religion clearly recognizes these facts of human
nature, and accommodates herself to them. However frankly it may be
acknowledged that a religious temperament--a certain complexus of
mental, moral, and even physical dispositions--is a condition favourable
to heroic sanctity, it must be emphatically denied that to be
"religious," in the Protestant sense of the word, is requisite for
salvation. And this denial the Church enforces by her recognition of the
"religious state" [2] as an extraordinary vocation. The purpose of
"orders" and "congregations" is to provide a suitable environment for
people of a religious temperament whose circumstances permit them to
attend to its development in a more exclusive and, as it were,
professional way. Not, indeed, that all religious-minded persons do, or
ought to, enter into that external state of life; nor that all who so
enter are by temperament and sympathy fitted for it, but that the
institution points to the Church's recognition of what is technically
called the "way of perfection" as something exceptional and
super-normal.
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