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.
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