trusted? If we think that the light of the Spirit of Truth has been leading us, does He not also lead them? And is not their unanimity the result of a collective guidance and a confluent illumination? Their combined and united light puts out our isolated spirit, as the noonday sun makes all lesser lights to be invisible. The habit of teaching others generates also a habit of forming and adhering to our own opinion. We are sent to affirm and to assert, and this leads easily to self-assertion. The teachers of dogma easily become dogmatic. Priests meet with less of contradiction than other men, and often bear it less patiently. Men in the world, as at the Bar, or in Parliament, are trained by constant contradiction to courtesy and forbearance. They are often an example and a rebuke to us. It is the absence of the gift of counsel that makes us opinionated and impatient.
4. Another sign of mental obedience or docility is a fear and suspicion of novelties in doctrine or practice or devotion. Theology or the science of God is a divine tradition, running down from the beginning, ever expanding, and rising in its unity and symmetry to perfection. It is built up indeed of things old and new, but the new are, as Vincent of Lerins said, non nova sed nove. The coins of the
