Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/568

10 of a different species, or the number of the limbs increased or diminished, the whole body would necessarily fall to pieces, or become monstrous, or, at least, be enfeebled. So, in like manner, let the one message of Christianity follow the laws of growth; consolidated indeed by years, expanded, elucidated, but incorrupt for ever, and inviolate, and full and perfect in the entireness of its parts, of its members, (as it were,) and its senses, but with no alteration, no loss of its characteristic marks, no variety in its definition.

For instance: our ancestors sowed of old in this corn-field of the Church the seeds of true faith as of wheat. It were very wrong and unseemly that we their children should choose, instead of the genuine crop, the intrusive deceit of the tares. Rather, it is right and fitting that the first and the last should not differ from each other, but that the seed being wheat, the crop should be wheat also … forbid that, in that Spiritual garden, the shoots of cinnamon and balsam should suddenly bear nettles or aconite. Whatever, then, divine husbandry and ancient faith have sown in our Church, must be cultivated and cherished by the diligence of posterity; must flourish and grow to ripeness; must advance and be perfected. It is pious to make accurate, to refine, to polish those primitive doctrines of heavenly philosophy; it is impious to change them for others. Let them be made intelligible, luminous, distinct; but they ought ever to retain their completeness, their entireness, their characteristic nature.

For, should this license of impious deceit once be allowed, I shudder to think of the risk, which will follow, of the excision and destruction of religion. If but one portion of the Catholic doctrine be renounced, another, and then another, and then again others will be renounced also, as if by right and custom. Moreover, if the separate parts be repudiated, what is to hinder the whole being at length repudiated equally? On the other hand, if new and old, foreign and native, profane and sacred, are once mingled together in any degree, this evil must necessarily extend