While, therefore, we entirely agree with Dr. Newman and with the great Anglican divines that the whole Bible is written on the principle of development, and that Christianity in its doctrine and discipline is and must be a development of the Bible, we yet cannot agree that for the adequate development of Christian doctrine, so far as theology exhibits this metaphysically and scientifically, the Church, whether ante-Nicene or post-Nicene, has ever yet furnished a channel. Thought and science follow their own law of development, they are slowly elaborated in the growth and forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakspeare calls,-- ... the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come; and their ripeness and unripeness, as Dr. Newman most truly says, are not an effect of our wishing or resolving. Rather do they seem brought about by a power such as Goethe figures by the _Zeit-Geist_ or Time-Spirit, and St. Paul describes as a divine power _revealing_ additions to what we possess already. But sects of men are apt to be shut up in sectarian ideas of their own, and to be less open to new general ideas than the main body of men; therefore St. Paul in the same breath exhorts to unity. What may justly be conceded to the Catholic Church is, that in her idea of a continuous developing power in united Christendom to work upon the data furnished by the Bible, and produce new combinations from them as the growth of time required it, she followed a true instinct. But the right _philosophical_ developments she vainly imagined herself to have had the power to produce, and her attempts in this direction were at most but a prophecy of this power, as alchemy is said to have been a prophecy of chemistry. With developments of discipline and church-order it is very different. The Bible raises, as we have seen, many and great questions of philosophy and criticism; still, essentially the Church was not a corporation for speculative purposes, but a corporation for purposes of moral growth and of practice. Terms like _God_, _creation_, _will_, _evil_, _propitiation_, _immortality_, evoke, as we have said, and must evoke, sooner or later, a philosophy; but to evoke this was the accident and not the essence of Christianity. What, then, was the essence?