itution like the Throne or
the Parliament.

"But may it not be pleaded that, however slight by comparison personal
life may seem, yet if it be true, the Church must include this in its
own mighty sum; and that what the Church adds to define, expand, and
elevate, to guide and support, belongs to growth in spiritual things,
not to those beginnings which only are here spoken of? And in defence of
a private view and hesitancy, such as is also felt in the organized
social life elsewhere, may it not be suggested that the past of
Christendom, great as it is in mental force, moral ardour, and spiritual
insight, and illustrious with triumphs over evil in man and in society,
and shining always with the leading of a great light, is yet a human
past, an imperfect stage of progress at every era? Is its historic life,
with all its accumulation of creed and custom, not a process of
Christianization, in which much has been sloughed off at every new birth
of the world? In reading the Fathers we come on states of mind and forms
of emotion due to transitory influences and surroundings; and in the
history of the Church, we come upon dogmas, ceremonials, methods of work
and aims of effort, which were of contemporary validity only. Such are
no longer rational or possible; they have passed out of life, belonging
to that body of man which is forever dying, not to the spirit that is
forever growing; and, too, as all men and bodies of men share in
imperfection, we come, in the Fathers and in the Church, upon passions,
persecutions, wars, vices, degradation, and failure, necessarily to be
accounted as a portion of the admixture of sin and wrong, of evil, in
the whole of man's historic life. In view of these obvious facts, and
also of the great discrepancies of such organic bodies as are here
spoken of in their total mass as the Church, and of their emphasis upon
such particularities, is not an attitude of reserve justifiable in a
young and conscientious heart? It may seem to be partial scepticism,
especially as the necessity for rejection of some portion of this
embodied past becomes clearer in the growth of the mind's information
and the strengthening of moral judgment in a rightful independence. But
if much must be cast away, let it not disturb us; it must be the more
in proportion as the nature of man suffers redemption. Let us own, then,
and reverence the great tradition of the Church; but he has feebly
grasped the idea of Christ leavening th