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x religious experience, not a tradition of the mere abstract logic of theological deduction. It is through the life of the risen Christ really lived in the Church that she, as the kernel of moral and religious humanity, becomes the witness to truth and the dispenser of it. She has no merely magical and miraculous power of conserving the truth so that it may magically and miraculously minister life. Her infallibility is not a magical and absolute gift, but a vital and therefore relative acquisition. And so it is that her methods of apologetic must vary if her claim to be the religious teacher of mankind is not to prove itself a vulgar deception haunted by the retribution of speedy exposure.

It is with this view of the nature of the religious tradition of Christendom that the authors of this Letter face the