is going to say will be infallibly the truth). And so arose the
necessity for still more miracles and changes, raisings of the
dead to life, and strikings of the living dead, and all those
marvels which have been a stumbling-block to men, of which the
Acts is full, and which, far from ever convincing one of the truth
of the Christian doctrine, can only repel men from it. The result
of such a means of confirming the truth was that the more these
confirmations of truth by tales of miracles were heaped up one
after another, the more the doctrine was distorted from its
original meaning, aid the more incomprehensible it became.

Thus it was from the earliest times, and so it went on, constantly
increasing, till it reached in our day the logical climax of the
dogmas of transubstantiation and the infallibility of the Pope, or
of the bishops, or of Scripture, and of requiring a blind faith
rendered incomprehensible and utterly meaningless, not in God, but
in Christ, not in a doctrine, but in a person, as in Catholicism,
or in persons, as in Greek Orthodoxy, or in a book, as in
Protestantism. The more widely Christianity was diffused, and the
greater the number of people unprepared for it who were brought
under its sway, the less it was understood, the more absolutely
was its infallibility insisted on, and the less possible it became
to understand the true meaning of the doctrine. In the times of
Constantine the whole interpretation of the doctrine had been
already reduced to a RESUME--supported by the temporal authority--
of the disputes that had taken place in the Council--to a creed
which reckoned off--I believe in so and so, and so and so, and so
and so to the end--to one holy, Apostolic Church, which means the
infallibility of those persons who call themselves the Church. So
that it all amounts to a man no longer believing in God nor