Page:The True Story of the Vatican Council.djvu/215

Rh of the Church in its manifold contacts with the world. The Church has been reproached as Tridentine. No greater honour could be paid to the Council of Trent. The Church is Tridentine in the sense in which it is Nicene, and in which it will henceforward bear the stamp of the Vatican Council. Every Œcumenical Council leaves its impress upon it, and all these impressions are clear and harmonious. The Church is not like a codex rescriptus in which the later writings obliterate or confuse the former, but like the exquisite operations of art in which the manifold lines and colours and tints are laid on in succession, each filling up what the other begins, and combining all into one perfect whole. But it is certain that after the Councils of Nicæa and of Trent the Arian and the Lutheran separations made many to fear lest evil had been done, and to doubt the prudence of the Council. They who had been brought up before the new definitions probably died in the belief that they could have gone on safely without them. And they who measured all things only by their own needs thought them to be unnecessary, and gave at most a cold submission to what had been decreed; so it might be now. But we must not measure all events by ourselves, nor must we make our own times so much the centre of all things as to think what is needless to us cannot be needed by others now and hereafter. Œcu-