. Nor could it
be maintained without extravagance that the letter of the New Testament,
or of any assignable number of books, comprises a delineation of all
possible forms which a Divine message will assume when submitted to a
multitude of minds."[93]

What relation, it may be asked, can this theory respecting the
development of revealed or Christian truth bear to the question of the
being and perfections of God? We answer, that it is founded on a general
philosophical principle which may affect the truths of natural as well
as those of revealed Religion; and that it is applied in such a way as
to show that, as it has already led to the worship of angels and saints,
so it may hereafter issue in the deification of Nature, which is
Pantheism, or in the separate worship of its component parts, which is
Polytheism; and, in either case, the personality and supremacy of the
one only, the living and the true God, would be effectually superseded,
if not explicitly denied.

But, is there any real danger of such a disastrous consummation? We
answer, that the mere coexistence of the theory of Ecclesiastical
Development with the infidel speculations on the doctrine of Human
Progress is of itself an ominous symptom; and, further, that the mutual
interchange of complimentary acknowledgments between the Infidel and
Popish parties is another, especially when both are found to coincide in
some of the main grounds of their opposition to Scripture as the supreme
rule of faith, and when the homage which the advocates of Development
render to the theory of progress is responded to by glowing eulogiums
from the infidel camp on the genius of Catholicism as the masterpiece of
human policy. But there are other grounds of apprehension, arising more
directly out of the very nature of the theory of Development itself.

That theory has been described by Dr. Brownson--himself a convert to
Catholicism--as the product of "a _school_ formed, at first, outside of
the Church, but now brought within her communion," and compared, in
regard to its dangerousness, with the speculations of Hermes and
Lamennais.[94] And a still more competent judge--Professor Sedgwick, of
Cambridge[95]--has characterized it as "a monstrous compound of Popery
and Pantheism," according to which "the Catholic faith is not a religion
revealed to us in the Sacred Books we call canonical, and in the works
of the Fathers which are supposed to contain the oral traditions of the
Apos