There is another advantage the Catholic rule has over the Protestant rule. In this world of perpetual change, and with the restless and ever-busy activity of the human mind, new questions are constantly coming up and in need of being answered, and so answered as to save the unity and integrity of the faith. The Bible having once spoken is henceforth silent; it can say nothing more, and make no further explanations of the faith to meet these new questions, and tell us explicitly what the word requires or forbids us to believe with regard to them. Hence, Protestants never know how to meet them. Then new or further explanations and decisions are constantly needed, and will be needed to the end of time. Even the explanations and decisions of the church, amply sufficient when made, not seldom, through the subtlety and activity of error, and its unceasing efforts to evade or obscure the truth, become insufficient, and need themselves to be further explained, and applied so as to strike in the head the new forms of old error and deprive them of their last subterfuge. These explanations and decisions so necessary, and which can be infallibly made only by a living and ever-present infallible authority, can be only fallibly made, if at all, on the Protestant rule. Even the creed of the church, though unalterable, needs from time to time not development, but new and further explanations, to meet and condemn the new forms of error that spring up, and to preserve the faith unimpaired and inviolate. How is this to be done infallibly by a book written two thousand years ago and private judgment, or without the 157 divine and infallible authority of the church? These remarks and explanations, we think, fully answer the objections of our legal friend to the belief on authority, and prove that no attempted retort of the Protestant on the Catholic can be sustained, or entertained even, for a moment. We have thus vindicated for him the Catholic rule, and proved that faith on that rule is possible, practicable, and rational, is reasonable obedience, and by no means a blind submission, as he probably supposes. What more can he ask of us? He cannot repeat his charge and say we have not met the question, for we have met it, at least so far as we understand it, and under more forms than he probably dreamed of in urging it. The question is one that meets the inquirer at the threshold, and he can hardly suppose that we could have accepted the church ourselves without meeting it, considering it at length, and disposing of it.