62 THE REV. CANON E. MCCLURE, M.A., M.R.I.A., ON 



Newman describes {Doctrine of Development, p. 37) what he 

 means by development. " This process is called the develop- 

 ment of an idea, being the germination, growth, and perfection 

 of some living, that is influential, truth, or apparent truth, in 

 the minds of men during a sufficient period, and it has this 

 necessary characteristic — that, since its province is the busy 

 scene of human life, it cannot develop at all except either by 

 destroying, or modifying and incorporating with itself, existing 

 modes of thinking and acting. Its development, then, is not 

 like a mathematical theorem worked out on paper, in which 

 each successive advance is a pure evolution from a foregoing, 

 but it is carried through individuals and bodies of men ; it 

 employs their minds as instruments, and depends upon them 

 while it uses them. 



" It grows where it incorporates ; and its purity consists not 

 in isolation, but in its continuity and sovereignty." " It is," he 

 continues, and here he uses Darwinian language before Darwin, 

 "the warfare of ideas, striving for the mastery. ... It is 

 elevated by trial and struggles into perfection. . . . Here 

 below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed 

 often." 



One would have thought there was ample scope here for 

 Father Tyrrell's reforming instincts, but he found at length the 



uncorrupted and unimpaired, full and perfect in all the measurements of 

 its parts, and in all its proper members and senses (so to speak), 

 admitting no further change or loss of distinctive characteristics, 

 allowing no variation of boundary. . . . 



"For it is right that the ancient doctrines or heavenly philosophy 

 should, as time goes on, be carefully tended, smoothed, polished ; it is 

 not right for them to be changed, maimed, mutilated. They may gain in 

 evidence, light, distinctness, but they must not lose their completeness, 

 integrity, characteristic property. 



" If once a licence of impious fraud be permitted, I should shudder to 

 say how great will be the risk of Religion being destroyed and wiped 

 out. For if any part of the Catholic Doctrine be laid aside, then another 

 part, and also another, and likewise another, and yet another, will go as 

 a matter of course and right. But when the parts one by one have been 

 rejected, what else will follow in the end but that the whole be equally 

 rejected ? 



"Again, moreover, if what is new begin to be mingled with the old, 

 foreign with domestic, profane with sacred, this custom will creep in 

 everywhere, until the Church at last will have nothing untampered with, 

 nothing unimpaired, nothing complete, nothing pure, but there will only 

 be a brothel of impious, shameless error, where formerly was a sanctuary 

 of chaste and undefiled Truth. May the Divine Pity turn aside this 

 wickedness from the minds of His own ; be it rather the frenzy of the 

 ungodly ! " — Dr. Bindley's Translation of the Commonitorium. 



