It can cause no wonder that men thus trained and tried should, when the severance of the mother country and its colonies was complete, have turned their first thoughts to the means of perpetuating that stewardship "of the mysteries of God," which they had so hardly won; that they should have held that to be the first step, and refused to take another till they had taken that. For, indeed, if the Church is to be rightly perpetuated under the conditions of a normal growth, it can only be perpetuated according to the original and organic law of its existence. When He to Whom in His resurrection "all power was given in heaven and in earth," committed to the Apostolic Ministry the tradition of the Apostolic Doctrine, in that great baptismal formula which is alike the source and summary of the Catholic Faith, He joined two things together that man may never put asunder. He may try the separation if he will--he has tried it, alas! more than once--but the end, the inevitable end, has always been the loss of the Apostolic Doctrine. Then, on the other hand, the gift of the Apostolic Ministry without the most wisely guarded guarantees that there shall be a steadfast continuance in the "doctrine of the Apostles, and in the breaking of bread, and the prayers," is a gift of more than doubtful value. Men seem to think to-day, that they can leave out what parts they please from the original and divine organism of the Church, and still work the rest at will. The attempt, believe me, is just as futile as it would be to undertake to deal in like fashion with one of those huge machines that work, all about us, with such life-like power, and attempt to make it do its work, when some portion of its complex mechanism had been removed. We cannot be too thankful for the merciful guiding that kept our fathers, a hundred years ago, from so fatal a mistake as that. For here, as well as in England, guarantees were demanded and given, so far as it was possible to give them, before the succession was communicated.