The principal, reason, nature, or constitution of things is in this order, and men must conform to it or live no true, no real life. They who recede from it advance towards nothing, and, as far as possible, become nothing. The church is independent, superior to all human control, and persistent, unaltered, and unalterable through all the vicissitudes of time and place, because the order in which she is founded is independent and persistent. She cannot be moved or harmed, because she rests on the principle, truth, and constitution of things, and is founded neither on the individual man, the state, nor the people, but on God himself, the Rock of Ages, against which anything created must rage and beat in vain. "On this rock will I build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The church is therefore, by her own divine constitution, by the very principle and law of her existence, indefectible. No weapon forged against her shall prosper. The wicked may conspire for her destruction, but in vain, because they conspire to destroy reality, and all reality is always invincible and indestructible. They cannot efface or overthrow her, because she is founded in the truth and reality of things, or what is the same thing, in the unalterable reason and will of God, in whom all creatures have their principle--live, move, and have their being. {55} They who oppose the church in the name of humanity or human progress, cannot succeed, because she is indivisible, and they would utterly defeat themselves if they could. They would deprive the human race of the law of God, which makes wise the simple and strengthens the weak, and deprive men and nations of the truth and reality of things, the very principle of all life, and of the very means and conditions of all progress. Man no doubt is progressive, but not in and by himself alone. Archimedes demanded a _pou sto_, a whereon to rest his fulcrum outside the earth, in order to move it, and there is no conceivable way by which a man can raise himself by a lever supported on himself. How is it that our philosophers fail to see the universal application of the laws which they themselves assert? All progress is by assimilation, by accretion, as that hierophant of progress, Pierre Leroux, has amply demonstrated, and if there is no reality outside of man or above him, what is there for him to assimilate, and how is he to become more than at any given time he already is? Swift ridiculed the philosophers of Laputa, who labored to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, but even more ridiculous are they who pretend that something may be assimilated from nothing, or that a thing can in and of itself make itself more than it is. Where there is nothing above man with which he does or may commune, there is for him no possibility of progress, and men and nations can never advance beyond what they are. This is so in the nature of things, and it is only what is implied in the maxim, _Ex nihilo nihil fit_.