The fundamental assets of the Church, anywhere and at any time, are but the faith and the charity of her children. Time and again, history has shown that political favor, social privileges, and financial resources are not substitutes for faith and charity.
Here we meet our first and biggest analytical difficulty: these true assets of the Church, her children's faith and charity, escape not only measurement but also direct observation.
We will, therefore, have to be satisfied with observing and measuring some of the effects and manifestations of faith and charity and then we shall have to use the strong assumption that the magnitudes of these manifestations give us some indication of the quality of their source.