You may take the whole range of human action in this respect, and you will invariably find a process of this kind. It is common sense. Men do not allow their conception of a thing to be deflected by falsehood or laziness or illusion without sharply re-acting against that deflection. All History is full of the corruption of institutions--and of men; but all History is most emphatically _not full_--in fact, in all History you will not find an example--of the corruption taking place without its being noted and resisted. Now here, in the case of Catholic doctrine, you have the singular fact that the process is the other way about. There is no protest till after the doctrine has become fixed. Take the case of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Whether true or false, it is certainly present before Cerinthus. The man who most violently combats Cerinthus’ statement that Our Lord suffered as man and not as God is one of our Lord’s own companions, St. John--a witness who had known Our Lord on earth, which Cerinthus never had. That is no proof that the doctrine is true; but it is proof of the historic fact that Apostolic society believed in the doctrine and that the first heresy in the matter was an innovation. Or take the doctrine of the Eucharist. For centuries the Real Presence was accepted; in general terms, it is true, but accepted none the less. You get it unmistakably from the Words of Institution right on for a thousand years. You can argue against the _intention_ of the early statements based upon the words of institution. You can say that those who first alluded to the Eucharist did not intend the full doctrine of later times. You can say that the Words of Institution in the Gospel were only used by Our Founder metaphorically. You may say that the famous description of the Mass in Justin Martyr nearly eighteen hundred years ago did not connote the exact doctrine of Transubstantiation. You may quote (as Cranmer did) passages from St. Augustine which permit the special pleader to use them (if he leaves out the context and refuses to mention other passages) as evidence of a subjective rather than an objective Presence. But the plain historical fact remains that there is not one single protest heard during all the centuries during which the Christian Church did take the Real Presence for granted, and built up round that accepted doctrine the whole mass of the Liturgy in East and West. It remains true that you can find no resistance against this universal attitude. Though there is metaphysical discussion, there is not a case of a man saying, “The original doctrine was not that of Real Presence: such doctrine is a corruption only just introduced, and I protest against it.” When the protest comes it is after thirty generations, at the end of the Dark Ages; and it produces a violent effect of innovation, of novelty.