Here is an organised corporation, a strict society, which has admittedly existed continuously for this prodigious length of time, through extreme vicissitudes of knowledge and of ignorance, through the most violent revolutions of human mood: a society which sprang up in the brilliant light of Pagan antiquity and of the half-divine Greek power of thought, and in the open majesty of the Empire, which persisted through the darkest periods of our material ignorance, which lived on through phases of gross popular credulity and equally gross alternate phases of popular scepticism; which has been bathed in the enthusiasm of the twelfth century, has gloried in the moral splendours of the thirteenth, has struggled through the filth of our modern time; has suffered the splendid temptations of the Renaissance; has next found itself struggling with the base madnesses of Puritan assaults. Through such endless variety of circumstance it has remained consistent throughout that long, long term of centuries; centuries filled with every conceivable reaction of the human mind, with gusts of enthusiasm blowing from every point, each in exact contradiction to some other earlier one. Through all these the institution which is historically the oldest and the most permanent of political human things cannot be discovered affected to change in any of its final pronouncements by these human changes. It cannot be discovered in a contradiction. That such a phenomenon--wholly unique in the story of mankind--should be of human origin is logically possible. It involves no contradiction in terms. An unbroken tradition of rigid caution, coupled with an unceasing consultation of record, might conceivably produce such consistency by human agency alone and as the result of human calculation. But the least we can say is that such an effect would be different from anything we know of men and of their actions. (b) _That the Church has maintained error after knowing it to be error: that it has lied._ The second charge under this head is that the Church has not only made, in good faith, errors which she has had to retract, but has actually relied on falsehood when she knew it to be falsehood and particularly in the case of errors originally committed in good faith, but continued with the deliberate intention to deceive. No Divine Authority would do that. Now the value of such assertions--and they are frequently made--may be tested _a fortiori_, by taking the two principal classical examples upon which our opponents especially rely. It would be impossible to go over the whole category of these assertions, for they touch innumerable points. But since they all have in common one similar misunderstanding, it will suffice to examine two with perhaps a brief allusion to another. These two chief examples I take to be the Donation of Constantine and the eternal Galileo case.