Page:Specimen pages of printing types from the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass (IA specimenpagesofp00plimrich).pdf/37

Rh choose, but moving steadily, and that not by the shaping of circumstances, but by the guiding of the Holy Ghost, toward that form and character which, having once taken on, it has new retained, whatever temporary obscuration of its primitive character or degradation of its high purpose may have befallen it, for well-nigh twenty centuries,

And therefore we are here to disown the theory that the organic form of Christianity, as the Catholic Church holds it and has perpetuated it, is merely the development and outcome of civil and secular institutions, amid which it originally found itself, any more than the Atonement on Calvary was the outcome of the Platonic or Aristotelian philosophies. Points of resemblance, points of contact, points of identity, even, we may own, here and there, it may be, in the one as in the others; but we are here to-day, if I at all understand the purpose of our coming, to affirm that yonder volume does not more truly declare to us the means of our salvation than it declares and defines that one preéminent agency, the, with its inspired message and its divinely instituted sacraments, and divinely appointed threefold ministry, as the visible agency and instrument by which that salvation is to be made known to men.

And here, at any rate, whatever may be proper elsewhere, we are not called upon to go beyond this. How truly a human body may be so designated which is more or less maimed or mutilated is a question which theology may not find it easier to answer in one domain than science in another. But in an age when there is so much invertebrate belief, and when the tone of mutual complacency is so great that one man’s delero (I dream) is as good as another man’s credo (I believe), it is as well in connection with such an occasion as this to understand the ground upon which we stand, and the point from which we set out. The cause of the reunion of Christendom will be greatly forwarded by the kindly temper which strives to understand, and scorns to misrepresent others; but it will not be helped by the mistaken amiability which seeks to misinterpret or consents to misrepresent ourselves.

I have said this much, and have endeavored to say it with utmost plainness, because, unless I am mistaken, the exigency of the hour demands it. But I have done so mainly because it opens the way to that larger view of our text and of this occasion to which, if possible, we should ascend.

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