As to divergence, the answer to me seems simple and brief. Where divergence is admitted, and so long as it is admitted, infallible pronouncement is neither claimed nor can be at work. The divergence is openly between the judgments or affirmations of individuals or of sections. If the Church, having definitely pronounced by the voice of her head and of any of the great councils with which he has been in communion and which have acted with his authority--the Council of Nicæa, for instance--something which in a later age the same authoritative organs had to deny in the face of new historical evidence, then there would be a fundamental divergence and an historical argument against the claim to Divine Authority. I repeat, as I shall continue to repeat throughout this brief essay, the essential point that the argument is negative. I am not affirming here, and for the moment, that such consistency is proof of the divinity of the claim--though it is certainly very remarkable; I am only pointing out that the consistency _is_ present throughout History. You may say, if you will, that it is present because even a human corporation claiming infallibility would take great care never to contradict itself. Granted (though I think it would have its work cut out)! But at least it must be admitted that the consistency is there, and that, therefore, an historical argument drawn from inconsistency does not lie. Now what of the more formidable argument drawn from change? It is not to be doubted as an historical truth that in one era the general mood of Christians with regard to a particular point lay in one direction, in another era, in another. It is probable, for instance, that the early Church expected the Second Advent in a more or less brief period. It is certain that many holy men, perhaps repeating the mood of their time, thought, in an earlier age, of the state of the dead as one of sleep awaiting the Resurrection, with no definition of the Particular Judgment, and so forth. In one period one devotion prevails; in another, another. One great doctrine is emphasised in one era; another in a later era. Here, then, is change. To which I answer that the change is never--has never been in any particular instance which any historian can find and point out--a change of doctrine. There has never been a definition, never a pronouncement, by any organ of the Church, saying “This or that is so,” of which such changes of mood have later compelled a retraction.