The heresy, after nearly three hundred years of vigour, has gone to pieces. The Bible outside the Catholic Church has lost authority. The original Catholic position remains. Indeed, there is a comic irony in noting that it is we Catholics to-day who are thought old-fashioned in maintaining our respect for the text of Scripture and in being slow to admit all the modern guess-work in derogation of it. So much for the test of Innovation. (2) I turn to the second test, the test of Critical Date. If it be true that the Catholic Church is the warping and corruption of an originally delivered truth, then that warping and corruption must have had an origin. I am walking by night along a road which is laid out upon the map for miles due east and west; but after so walking for some time I begin to notice by the stars that the road is bending. It turns more and more southward. The map has misled me. In such a case I can, when daylight returns, retrace my steps and I shall find the point of flexion. I may not be able to establish it to a yard, nor even, if the process be at first very gradual, to a quarter of a mile; but I shall at least be able to say, “Up to this point it was dead straight, pointing west. After this point (say, as much as a mile further on) it is clearly bending south of west, and I find it bending more and more southward as I proceed.” If not a point at least a section of flexion can be established. Now there is this remarkable historical fact about the process of the Catholic Church--that its Protestant opponents, all agreeing in its loss of direction, cannot agree as to when that loss began. There is not and apparently cannot be any general conclusion upon so simple an historical matter as to even the main historical section--first century, second, third, fourth, eleventh--in which this point of flexion lies. For one body of Protestant thought it is found in what they call “Counter-Reformation” of the sixteenth century. It was then that the Catholic Church went wrong, with its exaggeration of Papal power, of Eucharistic ritual, its more mechanical organisation of the Sacrament of Penance, and all the rest of it. In the fifteenth century the Church of England, of France, of Castille were all (rightly) in communion and their common authority was sound. By 1600 it was lost. For another set of Protestants the change was the opening of the Middle Ages--what is called the “Hildebrandine Movement” of 1050–85. Until then Christendom was proceeding in consonance with its tradition. The see of Peter had Primacy indeed, but had not developed a highly detailed jurisdiction over a vast number of personal and national affairs. The discipline of celibacy among the clergy in the West (so they tell us) had been optional; its universal enforcement was a corruption. The monastic institution had been free and sincere; it slowly became, after that date, enslaved to the Papal power and to Mammon, and was more and more a scandal of insincerity.