The line of the lady's argument is this. That Scripture without Tradition is quite insufficient for salvation. We cannot know anything about the Scriptures themselves, their composition, inspiration, interpretation, without Tradition. Besides the New Testament was not the text-book of the Apostles--it is a collection of some things they were inspired to write for the edification of the first Christians and others who had not seen our Lord; and the Epistles are a number of letters from inspired men bound up together in one volume. The body of doctrine, with its bearings, symmetry, extent, and obligation, was delivered orally by the Apostles, and the Epistles must be consonant to that system as well as explanatory of portions of it. Only by the unbroken succession of pastors from the Apostles to the present time, can we have any safeguard as {177} to what we are to believe, and how we are to believe. The Apostles and their successors were "to teach all nations," and Christ promised them and them alone the unerring guidance of the Holy Spirit. She then assigns to tradition the office of bearing testimony to what the doctrines of the Church have been, and are at present. The definitions of Councils are simple declarations that such and such is the belief then and from the beginning of the Catholic Church. They state what is, not invent what is to be. Now history, or written tradition, as contra-distinguished from Scripture, testifies to every single tenet of the Catholic Church--her creeds, liturgy, sacraments, jurisdiction. It testifies unerringly, too, even from the objections of heretics, to the fact that this Church has been always believed divine in her origin, divine in her teaching, infallible and unerring in her solemn pronouncements. This is fact, and who can gainsay it? This peculiar way of arguing, by making tradition or history bear witness to the existence of the Church, as well as to what she always declared to be her doctrine, is a very felicitous shape to cast her arguments into. It draws the line between faith and the evidence of faith. Evidence, human evidence of the first grade of moral certainty, says: The Church believed this, and that, and the other, at such and such times, and not as a new, but as an old doctrine, that came down from age to age since the Apostles. The same evidence says: that she believed them as revealed by God, and that she could not be mistaken on account of His promise. That she never swerved, and never will swerve, from one single article which she has once believed. If this Church be not _The Church_ of Christ, I ask you where is it to be found? In the second letter she says: