the church system divine, but to make the scriptural system human; or, at the best, perishable and temporary, like the ceremonial law of Moses.  Either the church system must be supposed to have superseded the scriptural system[6], and its unknown authors are the real apostles of our present faith, in which case, we do not see why it should not be superseded in its turn, and why the perfect manifestation of Christianity should not be found in the Koran, or in any still later system; or else neither of the two systems can be divine, but the one is merely the human production of the first century, the other that of the second and third.  If this be so, it is clearly open to all succeeding centuries to adopt whichever of the two they choose, or neither.

[Footnote 6:  This, it is well known, has been most ably maintained by Rothe, (Artfange der Christlichen Kirche und ihrer Verfassung, Wittenberg, 1837,) with respect to the origin of episcopacy.  He contends that it was instituted by the surviving apostles after the destruction of Jerusalem, as an intentional change from the earlier constitution of the church, in order to enable it to meet the peculiar difficulties and dangers of the times.  To this belongs the question of the meaning of the expression, [Greek:  oi tais deuterais ton Apostolon diataxesi parakolouthaekotes], in the famous Fragments of Irenaeus, published by Pfaff, from a manuscript in the library of Turin, and to be found in the Venice edition of Irenaeus, 1734, vol. ii. Fragmentorum, p. 10.  But then Rothe would admit that if the apostles altered what they themselves had appointed, it would follow that neither their earlier nor their later institutions were intended to be for all times and all places, but were simply adapted to a particular state of circumstances, and were alterable when that state was altered:  in short, whatever institutions the apostles changed were shown to be essentially changeable; otherwise their early institution was defective, which cannot be conceived.  And thus it may well be that the early church may have altered, in some points, the first institutions of the apostles, and may have been guided by God’s Spirit in doing so; but the error consists in believing that the now institutions were to be of necessity more permanent than those which they succeeded; in supposing that either the one or the other belong to the eternal truths and laws of Christ’s religion, when they belong, in fact, to the essentially changeable regulations of his church.]

To such consequences are those driven who maintain the divine authority of the system of Mr. Newman.  Assuredly the thirst for “something deeper and truer than satisfied the last century,” will not be allayed by a draught so scanty and so vapid; but after the mirage has beguiled and disappointed him for a season, the traveller presses on the more eagerly to the true and living well.