THIRD RESIDENCE AT CAPE TOWN. 131 



will evince the necessity of some certain rallying point, where 

 an effectual stand may be made against the presumption of 

 novices and the wiles of the deceitful. If such a post of safety 

 be not discoverable, how are the contests of the religious world 

 to terminate ? My friend (Dr. Jebb) and I think that it is to 

 be found in the written Word of God — not as interpreted for 

 himself by each ignorant or self-conceited individual — but as 

 illustrated by the converging rays of those who have been 

 successively lights in their generations. ' The opinions,' says 

 Vincentius, ' are to be collected of those Fathers alone who. 

 with holiness, wisdom, and constancy, living, teaching, and 

 persevering in the Catholic faith and communion, have enjoyed 

 the privilege of dying in Christ faithfully, and of dying for 

 Christ happily. It seems to us, that to trace out this concur- 

 rence is in reality to recur to God's work for elucidation of His 

 Word.' Such persons as Vincentius describes, were what they 

 Mere, through the operation of the Divine Spirit ; the virtues in 

 which they excelled were the fruit of that Spirit, and the 

 concordant principles by which that fruit was nourished and 

 matured, could be no other than rills and rivulets of that river 

 which proceedeth from the throne of God and of the Lamb. 

 What, then, is the unbroken agreement of results and principles 

 in this most interesting retrospect but, in a sober sense, the 

 witness of the Divine Spirit to His own truth ? If, therefore, it 

 has in any instance pleased that blessed Spirit to speak ob- 

 scurely, can we do more wisely than to examine how the same 

 adorable Agent has wrought, in order that the principles of 

 heavenly chemistry, delivered in the written Word, may be 

 explained by the practice of the all-wise Artist in the laboratory 

 of His Church ? Thus we conceive unity of sentiment on the 

 very matters that now divide Christians to be rationally and 

 luminously attainable, and it is our persuasion that it will be 

 attained, for our Saviour's prayer • cannot always remain un- 

 answered. Sooner or later Christians will be one, that the 

 world may believe, and perfected in one, that the world may 

 know." 



There is much in this that I like, especially the spirit in 

 which it concludes — the calm fixed hope, quietly resting on the 

 very nature of Christianity ; its confidence that a time of peace 

 and unity will yet dawn on the Church, and all the anti- 



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