that, while the former understands the creeds
and their tenets as symbols wherein man, striving to express the
inexpressible, finds relief and rest to his spirit, Newman looks upon
them as so much history, which if a man shall not accept as fact,
"without doubt he shall perish everlastingly". To him, as to all who
really stand by their order, the New Covenant is a revelation, complete
and final, of all that can or will be known of the transcendental
order. It claims that "a door was opened in heaven," and those
mysteries made manifest "to little ones" which had been "hidden from
the wise" and far-seeing philosophers of old. It claims to be "the
tabernacle of God with men," "God manifest in the flesh," or in
sacraments, rites and symbols--nay, it is the "city come out of heaven
from God," it is the cathedral of humanity.

This was believed profoundly, almost universally, in the days before
the flood--the flood of knowledge let loose upon mankind, beginning
with the days of the Renascimento and continuing down to our own. But
the philosopher-poet of the nineteenth century sees nothing of it in
the altar and system set up in this Western world. Like the rest, it
is, to him, a "little system," which ultimately ceases to be. The
heavenly city fades into an earthly chamber, the vast cathedral of
humanity dwindles to a spot on the horizon, it shrinks to the
dimensions of "a chapel in the infinite".

The first great shock to the pretentious dogmatism of the Western world
came with the discovery of Copernicus and Galileo that the current
astronomy was fundamentally wrong. No sun-star or swarm of worlds in
the infinite azure could be so precious in God's sight as this earth of
ours, it was believed, for had it not been chosen as the scene and
stage of that transcendent act whereby the Deity had consecrated
humanity for ever to himself? Now it turns out that the physical
origin of this world of ours is precisely that of others, while, so far
from being the centre of the universe, it is but a speck in infinity,
positively invisible from any of the million suns that light the
eternal way from our own central orb to the infinities that range
beyond. The ecclesiastical mind of those days astutely fastened on the
charge of impugning the sacred record of Moses--itself a phenomenal
instance of incompetent infallibility--but the real explanation of
Galileo's persecution lies in the fact that, with this earth in a
dependent po