should last, an Authority that should declare and preserve it as He
Himself delivered it. And next, it is evident that since the Catholic
Church alone even claims that prerogative, clearly and coherently, her
right to represent that Authority is in proportion to the clearness and
coherence of her claim. Or, again, she advances in support of that claim
precisely those same credentials as did He: she points to her miracles,
her achievements, the fulfilment of prophecy, the unity of her teaching,
the appeal to men's moral sense--all of them appeals to Reason, and
appeals which lead up, as did His, to the supreme claim, which He also
made, to demand an Act of Faith in herself as a Divine Teacher.

For she alone demands it. Other denominations of Christendom point to a
Book, or to the writings of Fathers, or to the example of their members,
and she too does these things. But it is she alone who appeals to these
things not as final in themselves, not as constituting in themselves a
final court of appeal, but as indicating as that court of appeal her own
Living Voice. _Believe me, for the works' sake_, she too says. "Use your
reason to the full to examine my credentials; study prophecy, history,
the Fathers--study my claims in any realm in which your intellect is
competent--and then see if it is not after all supremely reasonable for
Reason to abdicate that particular throne on which she has sat so long
and to seat Faith there instead? Certainly follow your Reason and use
your private judgment, for at present you have no other guide; and then,
please God, aided by Faith, Reason will itself bow before Faith, and
take her own place henceforth, not on the throne, but on the steps that
lead to it."

Is Reason, then, to be silent henceforth? Why, the whole of theology
gives the answer. Did Newman cease to think when he became a Catholic?
Did Thomas Aquinas resign his intellect when he devoted himself to