It seems to be admitted in these words, that, in the _past_ history of the Church, the development of the Catholic ritual _was_ attended with some danger of infection from Paganism or Pantheism; and there may be equal reason to fear that, in the _future_ history of the Church, still working on the principle of development, that danger may be very considerably aggravated by the general prevalence of theories utterly inconsistent with the faith of primitive times. What the Church has already done in the exercise of her developing power may be only a specimen of what she may hereafter accomplish. She has already developed Christianity into a system which bears a striking resemblance to Polytheism; she may yet develop it more fully, so as to bring it into accordance with philosophical Pantheism; or, retaining both forms,--for they are not necessarily exclusive of each other,--she may use the first in dealing with the ignorant, and reserve the second as a sort of esoteric doctrine for minds of higher culture. Nor let it be said that we are either unjust or uncharitable towards the Romish Church, in suggesting the possibility of some such development; for what she has already done, and what she still claims the power of doing, afford very sufficient ground for our remarks. When Dr. Conyers Middleton published his celebrated "Letter from Rome," showing an exact conformity between Popery and Paganism, and that "the religion of the present Romans is derived from that of their Heathen ancestors," many liberal Catholics resented the imputation as an insult to their faith; but now Mr. Newman not only admits the fact that the Church did _assimilate_ its ritual to the Paganism of former ages, but vindicates her right to do so, and ascribes to her _a power of assimilation_ to which it seems impossible to assign any limits. "There is, in truth," says this writer, "a certain virtue or grace in the Gospel, which changes the quality of doctrines, opinions, usages, actions, and personal characters, which become incorporated with it, and makes them right and acceptable to its Divine Author, when before they were either contrary to truth, or, at best, but shadows of it."--"Confiding, then, in the power of Christianity to resist the infection of evil, and to _transmute the very instruments and appendages of demon worship to an Evangelical use_, ... the rulers of the Church from early times were prepared, should the occasion arise, to adopt, or imitate, or sanction _the existing rites and customs of the populace_, as well as _the philosophy of the educated class_."--"The Church can extract good from evil, or, at least, gets no harm from it. She inherits the promise made to the disciples, that they should take up serpents, and, if they drank any deadly thing, it should not hurt them."--"It has borne, and can bear, principles or doctrines which, in other systems of religion, quickly degenerate into _fanaticism or