a process of Christianization, in which much has been sloughed off at every new birth of the world?  In reading the Fathers we come on states of mind and forms of emotion due to transitory influences and surroundings; and in the history of the Church, we come upon dogmas, ceremonials, methods of work and aims of effort, which were of contemporary validity only.  Such are no longer rational or possible; they have passed out of life, belonging to that body of man which is forever dying, not to the spirit that is forever growing; and, too, as all men and bodies of men share in imperfection, we come, in the Fathers and in the Church, upon passions, persecutions, wars, vices, degradation, and failure, necessarily to be accounted as a portion of the admixture of sin and wrong, of evil, in the whole of man’s historic life.  In view of these obvious facts, and also of the great discrepancies of such organic bodies as are here spoken of in their total mass as the Church, and of their emphasis upon such particularities, is not an attitude of reserve justifiable in a young and conscientious heart?  It may seem to be partial scepticism, especially as the necessity for rejection of some portion of this embodied past becomes clearer in the growth of the mind’s information and the strengthening of moral judgment in a rightful independence.  But if much must be cast away, let it not disturb us; it must be the more in proportion as the nature of man suffers redemption.  Let us own, then, and reverence the great tradition of the Church; but he has feebly grasped the idea of Christ leavening the world, and has read little in the records of pious ages even, who does not know that even in the Church it is needful to sift truth from falsehood, dead from living truth.

“If, however, a claim be advanced which forbids such a use of reason as we make in regard to all other human institutions, viewing them historically with reference to their constant service to mankind and their particular adaptation to a changing social state; if, as was the case with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, the Church proclaims a commission not subject to human control, by virtue of which it would impose creed and ritual, and assumes those great offices, reserved in Puritan thought to God only,—­then does it not usurp the function of the soul itself, suppress the personal revelation of the divine by taking from the soul the seals of original sovereignty, remove God to the first year of our era, relying on his mediate revelation in time, and thus take from common man the evidence of religion and therewith its certainty, and in general substitute faith in things for the vital faith?  If the voice of the Church is to find only its own echo in the inner voice of life, if its evidences of religion involve more than is near and present to every soul by virtue of its birth, if its rites have any other reality than that of the heart which expresses itself in them and so gives them life and significance, then its authority