Much false reasoning has been uttered about the "unchangeable church," as though, because "unchangeable," it was not adapted to a changing and striving world, when, in truth, for the very reason that the church of Christ is unchangeably true, she is required and adapted for all the changes and emergencies of time. Who ever heard a sailor complain of the mariner's compass, because, on account of its unchangeable obstinacy, it would not conform to his private judgments and caprices about the right course? No one. It is for the very reason that the mariner's compass is unchangeably true to the eternal law of magnetic attraction, under all circumstances and in all places, that it is the unerring guide among the whirlwinds and heavings of the great deep. Catholicity is the mariner's compass upon a greater deep--even that of the wild and rolling, beating ocean of humanity, pointing, amid sunny calms, or gentle winds, or raging gales, unerringly to the cross of Jesus Christ, as the needle of the mariner's compass points to the north--guiding, age after age, the precious freights of immortal souls to the harbor of infinite and unending joy. The force of this illustration is all the stronger that the mariner's compass is a human adaptation of an immutable law of nature to navigation, while the church of the living God is divine alike in origin and application, and has existed from the beginning, unchangeable, like God himself, yet adapting herself to the wants of every age. The church of God is like his own infinite providence, in which unchangeable truth meets in the harmony of mercy the innumerable changes of human need.