Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/258

 although not always with equal commanding authority. Rome still held up her old head, but now at last in diminished power, and with relatively reduced following. She had continued her independent self-developing career, but every successive doctrinal step had developed a limping human element, unable to keep up with the pace, and either left behind by voluntary secession, or forcibly expelled by the truth-avenging Church. Thus, when the personal infallibility was defined and proclaimed towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was permissively an "Ex-Cathedra-only-Infallibility." But when the "Wholly-Infallible" question came on in the next century, and the grudging and faith-wanting spirit of the Ex-Cathedra-only-Infallible was finally condemned by the Church, and its half-hearted maintainers had seceded or been expelled, the triumphant Church emerged with narrowed dimensions; and these were afterwards still further successively reduced when the popes were made equal to angels, then superior to angels, and so on; the Church, however, always concurrently maintaining that all these steps were alike within the knowledge and tradition of the Church from the very first.

Meanwhile, our national Anglican Church, Protestant and Scriptural, had pursued her quiet and steady, her comprehensive but unprivileged way. She avoided, in her teaching, those extreme views and doctrines which she held to have been tacked on, by after developments, to the simplicity of the original gospel, and which ever tended to throw a certain