The Atlantic Monthly, page 209 by Various Authors
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urch once represented is exhausted and consumed. It no longer inspires faith, no longer has power to unite or direct the human race.
The time of a new dogma is approaching, which will re-link earth with heaven in a vaster synthesis, fruitful of new and harmonious life.
It is for this that the Papacy expires. And it is our duty to declare this, without hypocritical reticence, or formulæ of speech, which, feigning to attack and venerate at one and the same time, do but parcel out, not solve the problem; because the future cannot be fully revealed until the past is entombed, and by weakly prolonging the delay we run the risk of introducing gangrene into the wound.
The formula of life and of the law of life from which the Papacy derived its existence and its mission was that of the fall of man and his redemption. The logical and inevitable consequences of this formula were:--
The doctrine of the necessity of mediation between man and God;
The belief in a direct, immediate, and immutable revelation, and hence in a privileged class,--naturally destined to centralize in one individual,--the office of which was to preserve that revelation inviolate;
The inefficacy of man's own efforts to achieve his own redemption, and the consequent substitution of unlimited faith in the Mediator, for works,--hence grace and predestination more or less explicitly substituted for free-will;
The separation of the human race into the elect and the non-elect;
The salvation of the one, and the eternal damnation of the other; and, above all,
The duality between earth and heaven, between the ideal and the real, between the aim set before man and a world condemned to anathema by the fall, and incapable, through the imperfection of its finite elements, of affording him the means of realizing that aim.
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