On both these faults and erroneous ways of thinking on religious matters, Revelation expresses itself equally in the tone of stern reprobation, though perhaps its language with regard to the former is even still more severe. As regards the spirit of innovation, all changes in this domain, which are merely human, and not visibly and manifestly of a divine spirit and origin, must simply on that account be opposed and condemned. Now, in both the parties into which the faith is unhappily divided, there are many who are captivated and led away by this spirit of change. For among those who were originally seduced by it not a few are now animated with a sincere and profound respect for whatever is old and sterling, while of the innovation-mongers of our days, many are to be found in the ranks of those who originally strove to stem the tide of alteration and change. Oh that all who are pervaded by this evil spirit, and are ever casting their views forward into the future, would only advance a little farther still in their thoughts, so as to take in the end and conclusion of all. In the knowledge of the final judgment of the world (and what is this philosophy of revelation but such a reminiscence of death and the end--in which light philosophy was even in olden times explained--not, indeed, in a narrow-minded limitation to ourselves, but in a far wider sense, embracing in its universal sympathy the final catastrophe of the whole human race), in the warnings and allusions to this last day of account, so long and so often given, men will find all the information that they seek, and will no longer need any human innovations, since by this key all that is old and eternal shall receive a trebly-exalted significance and a doubly-new life.
But besides the political body and the religious community, the world of letters forms a third society. Though numerically smaller, yet in its effects on the minds of men, whether it moves freely and diffuses itself without the rigid restraints of form, or is narrowly confined to the formalism of the school, it is, perhaps, as great as either. Spiritual in its matter and in its dissemination, it either renounces a divine sanction, and stands under the protection and supervision of the state--such, at least, is the predominant relation in recent times--or, as was formerly the case, it grows and flourishes beneath the shelter and through the fostering care of ecclesiastical institutions. Holding an intermediate place between the two other bodies of human society--in its subject-matter more akin to the one, but deriving from the other its external support--it is also of a mixed nature and partakes of both. But the inborn and original sin of science is exactly similar to that which infects political life. Manifesting itself in a twofold aberration, it either assumes, in the spirit of anarchy, an hostile position toward all that exists from without, or is given to men from above, or, perhaps, comes forward in a predominant love of system or scientific sectarianism, which not unfrequently is as fanatical as the political party-spirit with which, moreover, it is often very nearly and closely allied.