are limited to certain physical substances and bodily acts or postures, selected at first hand for the purpose:--water at one time, bread at another, oil at a third, handling of the head at a fourth. But the infusion of the supernatural efficacy into these "alvei" depends on an act of the appointed official; through whom alone the divine matter--no longer choked up--can have free currency into the persons of believers. To this inheritance of miracle is added a stewardship of inspiration. The episcopate is keeper of the Christian records: and as those records are only the first germ of an undeveloped revelation, with the same body is left the exclusive power of unfolding their significance, and directing the growth and expansion of their ever fertile principles. Whatever interpretation the hierarchy may put upon the Scriptures, whatever doctrine or discipline they may announce as agreeable with the mind of God, must be accepted as infallible and authoritative. The same spirit of absolute truth which spoke in the living voice of Christ, which guided the pen of evangelists, still prolongs itself in the thought and counsels of bishops, and renders their collective decisions binding as divine oracles. The people who form the obedient mass of the Catholic body are not without a share of this miraculous light in the soul; not indeed for the discernment of any new truth, but for the apprehension of the old. The moment the disciple is incorporated in the church, faith bursts into sight; he passes from opinion into knowledge; he perceives the objects of his worship, and the truth of his creed, with more than the certainty of sense; and as he bows before the altar, or commits himself to the "Mother of God," the real presence and the invisible world are as immediately with him as the breviary and the crucifix. Through the whole Catholic atmosphere is diffused a preternatural medium of _clairvoyance_, which at every touch of its ritual vibrates into activity, and opens to adoring view mysteries hid from minds without.[16]