De immutabilitate traditionis contra modernam haeresim evolutionismi

What they call revelation could have been nothing other than the consciousness acquired by man of his relation to God¹.

The beginning of revelation was the perception, however rudimentary, of that relation which must exist between man conscious of himself and God present beneath the world of phenomena. Specifically, however, Christian revelation in its principle and its origin was nothing but a perception in the soul of Christ, both of the relation by which Christ Himself was united with God, and of the relation that binds all men to the heavenly Father².

Likewise, the progress of revelation was the perception of new relations, or rather a more precise and more distinct determination of the essential relation, confusedly perceived from the beginning, while man was being formed to know ever better both the greatness of God and the nature of his own duty³.

Moreover, this is the difference between perceptions of the scientific order and perceptions of the truths that are called revealed: that the latter are not, like the former, the fruit of reason alone, but a certain elaboration of the intellect under the pressure of the heart and the direction of the moral sense, or of the will for the good⁴.

Now this elaboration, which has an ever more and more perfect result in the Israelite religion, and then in the Christian religion, is first and principally the operation of God in man, or the operation of man with God: insofar, namely, as it involves the action of God exciting man to seek, and helping him in his continual and endless effort toward the better⁵. Although account must also be taken of the historical events that came along, from which revealed religion took the occasions, the incitements, the helps, the matter of its own evolution, and all the more, the greater the vitality with which it was endowed. Hence it is no wonder either that the religion of Israel and the Christian religion, precisely because of their most intense vital energy, were more than all other religions subject to change⁶.

Therefore, two things in the present matter are by no means to be confused, rather they are to be adequately divided. On the one hand, religious ideas, which alone constitute the object of faith, and evolve day by day. On the other, historical facts, which supply the cause of the evolution of ideas, whether determinative or at least occasional.

And beginning from Christ, from whom our religion has its name and its origin, we must distinguish, as it were, two Christs. One historical, who alone exists for us in the real order of facts. The other non-historical, who is the Christ of faith, the Christ-idea, the Christ-spirit, or the mystical Christ¹.

Now the historical Christ is not, first of all, the Christ risen from the dead. First, because the risen Christ no longer belonged to the order of the present life, which is the order of sensible experience².

Second, because if the testimony of the New Testament be considered independently of the faith of the apostles, it offers only a limited probability, which no one will fail to see as disproportionate to the gravity of the thing attested³.

Third, because it is necessary that every natural argument for a supernatural fact be always found incomplete and deficient⁴.

Again, the Johannine Christ is utterly excluded from the truth of history. For the fourth Gospel can in no way be held as historical testimony concerning the life and doctrine of the Saviour. If Jesus acted and spoke as in the Synoptics, He could not have acted and spoken as in John; and conversely, if John's account is historical, the account of the Synoptics is nothing but an artificial account that disfigures Christ. But the Johannine Christ is the Christ of faith, spiritual and mystical, who transcends all the conditions of time and of earthly existence. Hence the narratives in John are not histories, but a mystical contemplation of the Gospel; the discourses, however, are theological meditations on the mystery of salvation⁵.

Still further, the Synoptic Christ is for the most part excluded from that same truth of history, because the Synoptics, in view of the purpose they had of producing faith, did not greatly care for historical fidelity, and in narrating the Gospel they interpreted the Gospel. Their books are books written for edification, and here and there adapted to the needs of the nascent churches. Whence it comes about that the burden falls upon the critic of making a selection in the evangelical facts·and in the preaching of the Saviour, between what belongs to the primitive memory and what pertains solely to the appraisals of faith, or to the later evolution of the Christian mind⁶.

Hence in the Gospel they have no historical truth: neither, first, Christ's attestation of His own divinity; nor, second, His affirmation of His mission to redeem the world by death on the cross; nor, third, the founding of the Church, especially as distinct from the Synagogue; nor, fourth, the institution of any sacrament.

Not, first, Christ's attestation of His own divinity. For that attestation would pertain to the preaching of Jesus, and as such ought to be recognized by the historian, if the fourth Gospel were a direct resonance of the doctrine of Jesus, or if the words of the Synoptics: No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and him to whom the Son has willed to reveal Him, were anything other than the offspring of a later tradition. But the fourth Gospel is a book of mystical theology in which nothing is heard but the voice of the Christian consciousness. And the passage of Matthew (XI, 25-27) and of Luke (X, 21-22) is a kind of imitation of the prayer of Jesus the son of Sirach (Eccli. LI), and seems to be the work of a certain Christian prophet. For since it can scarcely be believed that Christ wished to imitate Ecclesiasticus, it is probable enough that the words cited above were never spoken by Christ, but were the fruit of christological evolution in the first age of the Church⁷.

Nor, second, Christ's attestation of His mission to redeem the world by death on the cross. For faith in the expiatory death did not exist from the beginning, but was brought in by Paul. And the passage of Mark (X, 45), where it is read that the Son of Man came to give His soul as a redemption for many, was fabricated under the influence of Pauline theology, no less than the narratives of the last supper⁸.

Nor, third, the founding of the Church, especially as distinct from the Synagogue. For the institution of the Church is not a fact that can be historically demonstrated, and the apostolic tradition, rightly understood, supposes the Church founded upon Jesus rather than by Jesus; or at least, if by Jesus, not by Jesus preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, but by Jesus raised from the dead, and thus already placed beyond all the conditions of history and of demonstration. Accordingly, all the testimonies concerning the institution of the Church are nothing but testimonies of faith, which present to faith the mystical Christ, and His will over the Church⁹.

Nor, fourth, the institution of any sacrament. For Jesus, 'during His ministry, prescribed no ritual form of exterior worship characteristic of a religion: since in the Gospel preached by Him Christianity was not yet a religion distinct and existing by itself, but a certain simple religious renewal in the bosom of Judaism¹⁰.

And so the historical truth of the Gospel has nothing from first to last, except that Christ by prayer, confidence, and love gradually raised Himself to the greatest union with God, and consequently to the consciousness of a messianic vocation; that He began to preach the kingdom of heaven as soon to come with the end of the world; that He asserted Himself in this kingdom as the vicar and minister of God; that finally He accommodated His preaching to the supreme event of the now imminent consummation of the age, His preaching which was wholly about contempt for the world and the renunciation of temporal things¹¹.

Such, therefore, is the Christ of history, after whom began the evolution of Christian dogma, and in the first place the evolution of christological dogma, concerning the mystical Christ, the Christ-spirit, the immortal Christ, the Christ-God, who no longer belongs to the order of facts, but has His subsistence in faith alone, because He has from faith alone even His origin.

I. — Now the Christological dogma grew and matured in the Christian consciousness gradually, as by a certain continuous effort of faith towards its own transcendent object, and has not yet reached its ultimate term, although it always follows the same way, setting Jesus always in a higher place, and displaying an ever more comprehensive idea of His mission, according as there opens day by day to the enlightened faith a broader conception of the world and of humanity¹.

« The evangelists summarized the preaching of Jesus at the beginning of His ministry in the words: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. These words could just as well represent in brief the whole teaching of the Saviour in Galilee and in Jerusalem. They express the necessity of a moral conversion, but with a view to the kingdom ready to come, that is to say, with a view to the eschatological perspective... The perspective of the great advent explains why Jesus promulgates no properly disciplinary prescription... But the same perspective helps also to understand why He requires of all those who aspire to the kingdom, not the disposition to sacrifice eventually their goods and their family affections to the higher interest of salvation, but to leave everything immediately in order to follow Him, etc. ». L'Ev. et l'Egl., p. 5-24.

And the first stage of evolution was after the ignominious death of Jesus, when there began faith in Jesus living and seated at the right hand of God until the time of the parousia, that is, of the final advent of the kingdom of heaven. The second stage was in the access of the Gentiles to Christianity, which gave occasion to the Pauline theory of Jesus as saviour of all men, and of the new Adam who by His blood expiated the whole human race, and reconciled to God in one body through the cross the two peoples of the circumcision and of the foreskin. The third stage was after the contact of the Christian faith with Greek philosophy, when in that place, intermediate between God and the world, which Philo had assigned to the Λόγω, Paul placed the immortal and mystical Christ, so that He should be now the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature, through whom all things in the physical world were created, all things in the moral world pacified, both those in the heavens and those on the earth. The fourth stage was in the appearance of the fourth Gospel, when Jesus, Son of God and of man, the predestined saviour, was transformed into the Word made flesh, who manifested Himself to men as the fount of eternal light and of eternal life. The fifth stage was afterwards, when faith had to find a means of reconciling with one another the reality of the Gospel history, the theory of Paul and the theory of John, so that there should issue from them a coordinated system².

But in constructing this system, the Christian sense, after many hesitations, affirmed first that the Word and the Spirit are personalities distinct from the Father, the creator. Athanasius then, with the council of Nicaea, asserted that the Word of God, though personally distinct from the Father, is nevertheless God, consubstantial with the same Father. Hence was condemned the opinion of Apollinaris, who said that the Word was in the humanity of Jesus in the place of the intellective soul. Then the opinion of Nestorius, who posited a person of Jesus distinct from the person of the Word. Then the opinion of Eutyches, who would have the human nature incorporated into the divine nature. Finally it was added, in the fifth Council, that the humanity of Jesus is united to the Word substantially, and in the sixth Council, that the unity of person does not carry with it the unity of will. And so the Christological dogma was completed, insofar as that was possible according to the traditional notions and the principles of ancient philosophy³.

But now the problem rises again from the beginning, and the mystery of the hypostatic union needs a new determination, because the traditional formula no longer answers to the state of modern science. For according to theology the notion of person is a metaphysical notion, but in modern philosophy it has become a psychological notion belonging to the order of consciousness. Unless therefore we wish to say that the Church has lost the gifts of faith and of understanding by which she constructed the faith of time past, it is lawful to believe that by the same means she will be able to build the faith of time to come, by explaining her fundamental principle concerning the twofold revelation of God in the world, that is, the religious notion of the living God and of Christ God⁴.

II. — In the same way as the Christological dogma, the theological dogma too was evolved, until it should issue in faith in a threefold God without a multiplication of God. And although this dogma seems to consist of contradictory notions, it is not therefore to be thought that it was less accommodated to the religious sense from which it had its origin. For the defect of logic and of rational consistency which is a principle of ruin in philosophical systems is in theology rather a principle of solidity and of duration, because orthodoxy, when it no longer perceives the connexion and the concordance of its assertions, proclaims a mystery. And so it happened in fact with regard to the Incarnation, when the duality of natures in the unity of the supposit was defined; so too with regard to the Trinity, when the consubstantiality of the three persons definitively prevailed⁵.

III. — The same mode of evolution is discerned in the dogma of grace and in the dogma of the Church. But these two dogmas sprouted in the West in conformity with the peculiar genius of the Latins; whereas, on the contrary, the theological dogma had had a soft and easy soil for its cultivation in the East, where the Greek mind was more inclined to metaphysical speculations⁶.

In the latter of these two dogmas you will observe in particular that the determinations of the principle of authority in the Church do not rest upon a literal and logical interpretation of the texts (Matth. XVI-18, XVIII-18, Ioan. XXI-15, etc.). because the Church is founded not upon texts but upon a living faith, and through this faith, not through the texts, does she subsist, except insofar as faith uses the texts, interpreting them, and considering in them the express will of its Christ, who is not the historical Christ but the Christ-idea, or the mystical Christ⁷.

For it is certain that Jesus, who was persuaded that the consummation of the world was already at hand, had thought nothing at all of instituting an ecclesiastical government upon earth. But after Him, in response to the exigency born of that supreme law which is social conservation, there was introduced gradually and imperceptibly a hierarchical organization under the primacy of the Roman bishop, and those things were accommodated to the conditions of a world that endures which had been said by Jesus only for a world soon to perish⁸.

Accordingly the present government of the Roman Church, most like to a military government, received its determination under the influence of contingent circumstances only. And since, on the other hand, it easily furnishes an occasion for the gravest inconveniences (of which sort are the oppression of individuals, and the obstruction hindering the scientific movement, and generally all the forms of free examination), it may rightly and deservedly be asked whether that same Church, which has exaggerated the principle of authority up to the furthest limits, is not soon to be placed under the necessity of attenuating the quasi-despotic forms of her government; and that after the manner of human governments, which are compelled to abolish them day by day. Nay, it is a conjecture, and one greatly to be desired, that in the future democracy which is already being prepared, the bishops will not be so great among men, but, losing nothing in the meantime of the rights of their ministry (which will then at last resume the primitive and essential character of duties), they will have a manner of acting with the faithful more conformable to the fundamental equality and to the personal dignity of all Christians⁹.

IV. — The sacramental system too, taken as a whole, keeps the general condition of evolution, and luminously shows the persevering effort of Christianity to pervade with its spirit and, as it were, to imbue the whole life of man, from birth even to death¹⁰.

And the primitive Church indeed had as yet only two sacraments, namely baptism and the Eucharist; in what sense they can be said to have been instituted by Christ, it is necessary to consider¹¹.

Certainly the institution of baptism must be referred to the Christ of faith, not to the Christ of history. For certain things about baptism are contained in the fourth Gospel, as is that word of Ioan. III-5: Unless one be born again, etc., together with those passages where it is read that Jesus was baptizing, Ioan. III 22, IV-1. But it has often already been said that in the fourth Gospel nothing is heard but the voice of Christian consciousness and faith. But concerning the other things that are contained in the Synoptics, as is that word of Matth. XXVIII-19: Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, it must be observed that they are reported as spoken by the Christ risen from the dead, who is outside every order of concrete reality as far as we are concerned. Moreover, so categorical and distinct an enumeration of the three persons, which would scarcely be possible in the fourth Gospel, cannot be found in the first, except as a gloss inserted under the influence of Christian usage. Whence the historian rightly and deservedly asserts that the first of the Christian sacraments was born with the Christian community, through the imitation of Jewish customs. Likewise, that it is the community itself which determined the conditions in which baptism must be administered, the community also which made baptism necessary, and annexed to it all the obligations of the Christian profession. Yet even so, from the standpoint of faith, baptism can be said to have been instituted by Christ, because what the community ordained, that was willed by the Spirit who governs the community, and consequently by the immortal Christ who gives the Spirit¹².

The same applies a fortiori to confirmation, which in primitive Christianity was not yet formally distinguished from baptism. Although theology is free to admit a virtual distinction which has been reduced to act according to the need of the community, by the authority of the Church in which Christ lives¹³.

But of the other sacrament which the primitive Church had, that is, of the Eucharist, one must judge as of baptism. For in Paul's narrative of the last supper (1 Cor. XI), which is the most complete of all, it is difficult to distinguish what may be from the primitive tradition from what belongs to the theological and moral commentary of the apostle. For Paul is the theologian of the redemptive death, and it is manifest that he interprets, according to his own theory of universal expiation, the supper that commemorates the death. Further, it seems clear enough that those words: This is my blood of the new testament which shall be shed for many, were added by the redactor of the second Gospel to a simpler narrative which previously ran thus: And while they were eating, Jesus took bread and blessing it broke it, and gave it to them, and said: Take it, this is my body. And taking the chalice, giving thanks, He gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And He said to them: Amen I say to you, that I will drink no more of this fruit of the vine until that day when I shall drink it new in the kingdom of God. And this narrative agrees with the narrative of Luke, without the additions which were afterwards imported from the first to the Corinthians. In which shorter narrative indeed the idea of a death near at hand is suggested, but not the idea of expiation, and there is nothing that hints at a renewal of the supper outside the messianic banquet at the coming of the heavenly kingdom. Accordingly the origin of the Eucharist is presented to the historian in the same conditions as the origin of baptism, with only a twofold difference preserved. The first is that it is connected with the memory of a determinate and precise circumstance, the last supper of Jesus with His disciples. The second is that the circumstances are better discerned in which the memory of the last supper in some way became incarnate in the supper of the apostolic community, that is, in the sacrament of the Eucharist¹⁴.

Besides, faith in the real presence developed together with faith in the Christ risen from the dead, in the immortal Christ, in the Christ-Spirit, and had its root in large part in those visions in which Jesus appeared alive again, breaking and giving bread to His friends¹⁵.

Now, however, the word of the Johannine Christ concerning the remission of sins (Ioann. XX-23) does not directly regard the sacrament of penance. The theory which places the matter in the three acts of the penitent, and the form of the sacrament in the absolution, has no apostolic origin. The confession of sins committed after baptism was not formally prescribed by Christ. The first Christian age did not acknowledge as a sacrament the private confession made to the priest alone. Ecclesiastical absolution was not originally regarded as a judicial sentence¹⁶.

For in very truth, the Church of the earlier age did not have the idea of a Christian sinner and one reconciled, but only little by little was this notion introduced, and together with it the notion of a second plank after shipwreck. Yet nevertheless, although the Gospel texts concerning the power of the keys regard principally baptism, they still suppose in the Church a consciousness of an unlimited power of remitting, which in the course of time gave origin to a duplication of baptism in the sacrament of penance, And this origin is legitimate from the standpoint of faith, because it presents a certain aspect of the Christ who lives, and of the Spirit who acts in the Church from the beginning. Wherefore, in this sense, the historian can admit that there is nothing in the present discipline of penance that is foreign to the institution of Christ¹⁷.

Likewise, since Jesus seems to have prescribed, or at least permitted, that anointings of oil joined with certain prayers be made for the sick, for their relief or healing, this usage, persisting after Jesus, at length issued in the sacrament of extreme unction¹⁸.

Nor is the origin of the sacrament of Orders dissimilar, because insofar as the supper gradually assumed the character of a liturgical act, those who were wont to preside over it acquired the character of priests. Further, the elders (whence the name presbyteri), who in the Christian assemblies discharged the office of watching over (whence the name episcopi), were instituted by the apostles that the need of organization in the Christian communities might be satisfied, but by no means for the perpetuity of the apostolic mission and power. Their ministry coexisted with the ministry of the apostleship, and afterwards, as need required, it was in fact substituted in its place. But the distinction between bishop and presbyter came later. And all these things are the work of the Spirit in the Church; but the institution of Christ, for him who believes in Christ¹⁹.

From the first, therefore, to the last, nothing is more evident than that the general idea of sacramental institution, as it is enunciated in the decrees of Trent, is not a historical representation of what Jesus did and the apostolic Church felt, but a mere interpretation of the traditional fact, which has authority and value for faith alone²⁰.

Hence it is also evident that the epoch in which the Church determined the sevenfold number of the sacraments (about the twelfth century) was only a certain particular phase of sacramental evolution, and that this evolution has by no means reached its last term, because it will not be able to receive an end except with the Church herself²¹.

Now, sacramental symbols will henceforth be able to be held as not unworthy of the majesty of God, insofar as it is well understood that they are not interposed between God and man as instruments of sanctification, but only as recalling to the mind of man the perpetually beneficent presence of his Creator²².

I. — You will conclude, therefore, that faith has no permanent dwelling on earth, although it always stands in need of transient tabernacles. You will conclude especially that in vain would they try to retain it in forms now grown antiquated, which, having been accommodated to another mentality, can now be nothing more than venerable monuments of a time that is past¹.

For now the new state of the culture of the human spirit calls on every side for a new evolution. In this new evolution, indeed, the Church will have nothing else to do than what she has done from the beginning. For she has always adapted herself with wondrous flexibility to progress, casting aside the old sense of the dogmas and substituting the new, which was suited to the new times².

Nor does it avail to say that the Catholic Church seems not to acknowledge the existence of this change of hers in past centuries — nay rather, she condemned under anathema in the Vatican Council the opinions that assert it. For this is so because she has not yet arrived at the consciousness of her own evolution, and does not yet have a fixed theory concerning the philosophy of her own history. Wherefore nothing else follows than that one thing still remains to be evolved in the Church, and that is the very idea or notion of evolution³.

II. — You will conclude further that faith and history are altogether disparate things. For history is about facts, whereas faith is only about ideas that are evolved on the occasion of facts, and advance with a continuous motion toward the highest ideal. Disparate, too, are the domains of theology and the domains of criticism. For it belongs to the theologian to define the form of Christian truth that now is; to the critic, to investigate the other form that was at the origin. For it can be said without paradox that there is not even one chapter of Scripture, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of the Apocalypse, in which is contained a doctrine altogether identical with the Church's present doctrine on the same object. And therefore, too, there is not even one chapter that has the same sense for the critic and for the theologian⁴.

Whence it follows that it is impossible for the critic ever to contradict the theologian, or vice versa, provided each keeps himself within his own sphere; impossible also, and for the same reason, for criticism ever to be in opposition to faith. And the reason is that there is no possible opposition where there is no possible point of junction, as in fact happens at present, the presuppositions being granted. For if faith is not about facts but only about conceptions, and these according to the form of evolution contemporary with them, which is wholly different from the form that the conceptions of earlier times had; if, moreover, criticism judges only of facts or of the forms that faith had in ages past: it is clear that the believer never meets the critic on the same field. The critic will be able to coexist in the same man together with the believer, and whatever the former may opine, the latter will always remain in the peaceful possession of his faith.

And so much the more easily will this happen, because the believer, for his part, never adheres from the heart to any determinate formula, but always adheres by his intention to the absolute and unknown truth which the imperfect and relative formula proposed by the Church figures. For to adhere to the formula as such, by the assent of divine faith, would be the same as to adhere to its inevitable imperfections; the same as to proclaim the formula imperfectible and adequate, although it neither is nor can be absolutely true. The Catholic, then, can believe the Church's authority, and the things that the Church teaches, but he does not for that reason think that the ecclesiastical formulary signifies its object with such perfection that nothing in it is ever to be corrected by way of interpretation⁵.

Up to now, then, you had thought, my good man, that the whole object of our faith is something solidly subsistent in the order of objective reality, made known to us, or attested, by God revealing. But in this you were mistaken, and it is time you knew that this object is nothing else than a certain complex of ideas that the human mind has brought forth and is still elaborating. An idea, Christ God. An idea, Christ risen from the dead. An idea, the mystery of the Trinity. An idea, the real presence under the species of the sacrament. An idea, eternal beatitude with all the promises of the life to come — so that that anchor of your hope must henceforth be fixed, not in the firm earth of the living, but in conceptions subject to indefinite evolution, that anchor which formerly, deceived by an excessive simplicity, you thought to advance even into the interior of the veil, where the forerunner, Jesus, entered for us, that is, the real and historical Christ.

Up to now you had thought that in the aforesaid object of our faith many facts are contained as such. Facts, I say, that are indeed simply historical insofar as they are attested by human historical testimony, but that pertain altogether to divine faith insofar as they are at the same time invested with the higher and firmer testimony of God. And again you were mistaken, because facts as facts neither are nor ever can be part of the object of faith. But if the passion, the crucifixion, and the death of Jesus, for example, are counted among the other articles of faith in the creed, they enter the order of faith only to the extent that they are affirmed by the religious sense and introduced into the construction of an ideal system. Nevertheless, the objective materiality of these facts is the object of historical knowledge alone; it is placed exclusively under the judgment of history alone¹.

Up to now you had thought that the Gospel is a book of absolute inerrancy, where the figure of Jesus Christ our Lord is genuine, whose goodness and kindness has appeared to all men, instructing us that, denying impiety and worldly desires, we should live soberly and justly and piously in this world. But these again are things of the old and antiquated style². John, with his mystical fictions, utterly disfigures the real Christ. The Synoptics, however, have so many spurious elements mixed in that it is extremely difficult for criticism to distinguish the genuine accounts from the non-genuine. Nay more, even in the very undoubted and most authentic words of the Saviour, there will be nothing for you to seek hereafter as a sure rule of truth and holiness. Perhaps you thought that the prayer which the Lord Jesus taught you in the Gospel is good. But now you must know that the Lord's Prayer, in certain of its parts, offers no less occasion for criticism than the prayer to St Anthony of Padua for recovering a lost object, and that, taken in the rigour of its historical and primitive signification, it is subversive of the social economy³.

Up to now you had thought that our religion, the constitution of the Church, the Christian sacrifice and sacraments are of divine law, that is, of God's institution. But again you must renounce this pious credulity too, or at any rate entirely change the notion of divine law that you had previously formed for yourself. For in truth all these things were invented by the community, willed by the community, prescribed by the community, imposed by the community. Since, however, nothing certainly prevents you from considering the community as that in which the spirit of the mystical Christ acts and lives, if in this sense it pleases you to find an institution greater than human, you may do so freely, and console yourself with these words.

Up to now you had believed in the sincerity of Catholics. You thought that the Catholic feels in his heart nothing other than what he professes with his mouth, according to that word of the apostle: With the heart one believes unto justice, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. And you were wrong! For while you spontaneously profess the Catholic faith, while you say that you hold it truly, while you promise, vow and swear to retain and confess it whole and immaculate to the last breath of life, in reality you do not adhere to the formula that you pronounce with your mouth. For hear again: « The believer adheres by his intention to the full and absolute truth which the ecclesiastical formula figures. But to adhere to the formula as such, with an assent of divine faith, would be the same as to adhere to its inevitable imperfections, the same as to proclaim it imperfectible and adequate, although it is inadequate and imperfect »⁴. What then? Are you a liar? Are you a perjurer? Are you a hypocrite? And indeed, as regards the past, you will doubtless have as your excuse that you had not yet arrived at the consciousness of this hypocrisy of yours. But you now show yourself anxious about the future. Yet there is nothing for you to fear. For we have already been taught, and not in vain, in the matter of the literary forms of Sacred Scripture, that in the East a lie is not a lie. Extend, then, this doctrine a little from the East to the West, at least as regards the special matter of faith, and you will be secure from every scruple.

Up to now you would have held it a crime to agree with the doctrines of heretics, or of those who in the old style were called such. But now see by what an absurd prejudice you were held. Will not the Lutheran formula too, or the Socinian, or the Arian, or the Mohammedan, by the same right and the same title as the formula of the Roman Catholic Church, be able to figure that absolute and unknown truth, to which alone you always adhere by intention? Therefore it matters very little to what confession you have given your name. Are you a Catholic? Become a Protestant, if you please. Nay more, nothing will stand in the way of your being a Catholic and a Protestant at once, because the simultaneous profession of Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Calvinism, and so on, will in no way prejudice the Catholic profession. And who, after all, can there be that will not adhere by his intention to the unknown truth alone, which is perhaps to be revealed in the future? Therefore by the communion of faith we are already associated with all the confessions that are in the world, and already the dawn is breaking of that age in which the religion of all humanity will be one, all the divisions being abolished for ever which ancient superstition had brought in.