Death is in all things: yet how small it seems, God's chosen acre on this mountain-side: A speck, a mote: while yonder cornland gleams With hoarded plenty, stretching far and wide. A hundred acres there Content not one: one acre serves a thousand here. Ah! we forget them in our changing lot-- Forget the past in present weal or woe; But yet, perchance, more angels guard this spot Than wander in the living fields below: And, as I pass the gate, The world without seems strangely void and desolate. -------- {175} The Function of the Subjective in Religion. [Footnote 25] [Footnote 25: This Paper was read before the Academia of the Catholic Religion, in London, June 11, 1867, by Very Rev. W. H. Anderdon, D.D., M.A. Oxon.] Any one not a Catholic, but fairly acquainted with the church's past and present, if he had to define by a term her prevailing character, would use some such word as _unchangeable_. He might use it with admiration, as historians have done; or with vexation and anger, as controversialists do. He might regard it as a quality that raised the church above, or kept it behind the age; made it venerable and noble, or deprived it of all progressive and free spirit. But, with evil report or good report, and in whatever contrast with the communions around it, which rise and fall, are modified and melt away, he would confess the church to be unchangeable. The Catholic accepts this statement, and completes it by adding the cause of the church's preternatural sameness. He calls it "the pillar and ground of the truth;" the perpetual home and impregnable fortress of the divine revelation. The characteristics of the one faith, he says, follow those of the one Lord, as the shadow attends the substance which projects it. The mystical spouse is immutable in faith and morality, because with her divine Lord there is "no change nor shadow of vicissitude." The passage of centuries, phases of human society, rise, progress, and dissolution of theories and religious opinions leave her where they found her; because "Jesus Christ is yesterday and to-day, and the same forever." "_Tempus non occurrit Ecclesiae_;" because He is "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end," "who inhabiteth eternity."