Her doctrines, as she one by one unfolds them, emerge upon us like petals from a half-closed bud.

They are not added arbitrarily from without; they are developed from within.

They are the flowers contained from the first in the bud of our moral consciousness.

When she formulates in these days something that has not been formulated before, she is no more enunciating a new truth than was Newton when he enunciated the theory of gravitation.
Whatever truths, hitherto hidden, she may in the course of time grow conscious of, she holds that these were always implied in her teaching, though before she did not know it; just as gravitation was implied in many ascertained facts that men knew well enough long before they knew that it was implied in them.

Thus far, then, the Church of Rome essentially is the spiritual sense of humanity, speaking to men through its proper and only possible organ.