spiritual vitality, or openness to heaven and union with God, depend entirely on the reverence, obedience, helpfulness, purity, truthfulness, chastity, industry, honesty, charity, prayerfulness, humility, unselfishness, and mutual love of its members. These are the fruits of faith in genuine truth which is always married to genuine good.
Creeds, dogmas, ceremonies are outward expressions, forms, and correspondences with which the religious idea is clothed and embodied, so that it may govern the life of man in all its relations. Their various changes are the results of a perpetual effort to readjust the external or institutional life of man into harmony with his interior conditions. The most secret and powerful springs in the philosophy of history are to be found in the revolutions of the religious idea.
Historical development, theological and otherwise, is the evolution according to determinate natural and spiritual laws, of what was involved in the will and design of Divine Providence from the beginning.
Every new revelation with its new Church is a discrete step in the common life of humanity, and the last is always indissolubly connected with all that preceded it, as a part of a perfect whole.
