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Rh tures were written. The Church itself is the Divine witness, teacher, and judge, of the revelation entrusted to it. There exists no other. There is no tribunal to which appeal from the Church can lie. There is no co-ordinate witness, teacher, or judge, who can revise, or criticize, or test, the teaching of the Church. It is sole and alone in the world. And to it may be applied the words of St. Paul, as St. John Chrysostom has applied them: 'The spiritual man judgeth all things and he himself is judged by no one.' The Ecclesia docens, or the pastors of the Church, with their head, are a witness divinely sustained and guided to guard and to declare the faith. They were antecedent to history, and are independent of it. The sources from which they draw their testimony of the faith are not in human histories, but in Apostolical tradition, in Scripture, in Creeds, in the Liturgy, in the public worship and law of the Church, in Councils: and in the interpretation of all these things by the supreme authority of the Church itself.

The Church has indeed a history. Its course and its acts have been recorded by human hands. It has its annals, like the empire of Rome or of Britain. But its history is no more than its footprints in time, which record indeed, but cause nothing and create nothing.

The tradition of the Church may be historically treated; but between history and the tradition of the Church there is a clear distinction. The school of scientific historians, if I understand it, lays down as a principle that history is tradition, and tradition