144 ON NOVEL OPINIONS If in religious contemplation or dis cussion, we once give the reins to fancy, if we cherish every seducing thought, merely because it is new, if we set up for complete independence of opinion, if we assume individual release from all the ties that hold Christian society toge- ther, if we permit ourselves to plunge into theunfathomable ocean of discovery, without compass or rudder, there is no saying where we may land ; it may be on the shore we now dread. Many of these leaders differ in opinion, but each seems to lay as exclusive a claim to truth as the Pope himself; but as the latter was equally infallible when there was one Pope at Avignon and another at Rome, so the infallibility here seems to be lodged by each in himself, only with this varia- tion, that these last begin by differing from each other, till in their more ad- vanced progress they come to differ from themselves. Is not the recent secession founded on a kind of spiritual democracy, an over-
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