The second succession is that of the Truth itself committed to these men. For that plenitude of teaching which the Apostles delivered orally to the Church has never ceased to rest in her, and out of it she dispenses to all the ages her divine message. But part of this teaching by the further ordering of the Spirit of Truth has been incorporated in writing. And no one can doubt that this incorporation has given a firmness and stability to the teaching which we do not see how it could otherwise have possessed. Thus the great Tradition of the Truth poured out upon the Church has been partly written and partly unwritten; not as if there were two teachings separable from each other, but one and the same which runs in a perpetual blending. Through the written teaching we receive the very words consecrated by our Lord’s use: we have the priceless privilege of knowing how he spoke; of catching the accents of His voice, and the look of His eyes, and the gestures of His body, portrayed in that narrative. The words of Him who spake as never man spake live and sound for ever in our ears; and we recognise in the structure of His sentences, which convey in a clause principles of endless application, forces on which a universe can be built, the Father’s Word, and the world’s Creator, and the Church’s Head. Parable and apophthegm and answer, metaphor and plain speech, when used by Him, are all impregnated with this power. And now that we possess this peculiar language of the Word Incarnate, embodied and fixed for ever to our senses as well as our affections, it seems as if we could not have done without it. Then the mode in which His own Apostles apply and illustrate His doctrines, and exhibit to us the formation of the society which He came to institute, possesses a value only subordinate to His own words. The written word, it has been said,(129) gives to the whole Church through all times a sense of the truth and consistency of her teaching like that which the sense of personal identity gives to the individual respecting his own being. And again, what memory is to the single man, such is the whole tradition of the Truth in the bosom of the Church. But it is through the unwritten teaching deposited in her by the Apostles that she possesses the key to the true understanding of that which is written. The one in her practice has never been severed from the other. So dear has the written word been to her that almost the blackest epithet in language, “traitor,” is derived from the name which she gave to those who, under fear of persecution, surrendered to the heathen her sacred books. With these in her hand, or rather in her heart, she has directed and carried out that great system of instruction which the Apostles laid down and established by their acts. For to her what they did was as sacred as what they said, or what they wrote; and numberless acts of theirs constituted her teaching originally, and have prolonged and continued it on since.