The formula of life and of the law of life from which the Papacy derived its existence and its mission was that of the fall of man and his redemption. The logical and inevitable consequences of this formula were:—
The doctrine of the necessity of mediation between man and God;
The belief in a direct, immediate, and immutable revelation, and hence in a privileged class,—naturally destined to centralize in one individual,—the office of which was to preserve that revelation inviolate;
The inefficacy of man's own efforts to achieve his own redemption, and the consequent substitution of unlimited faith in the Mediator, for works,—hence grace and predestination more or less explicitly substituted for free-will;
The separation of the human race into the elect and the non-elect;
The salvation of the one, and the eternal damnation of the other; and, above all,
The duality between earth and heaven, between the ideal and the real, between the aim set before man and a world condemned to anathema by the fall, and incapable, through the imperfection of its finite elements, of affording him the means of realizing that aim.
In fact, the religious synthesis which succeeded Polytheism did not contemplate, nor did the historical succession of the epochs allow it to contemplate, any conception of life embracing more than the individual; it offered the individual a means of salvation in despite of the egotism, tyranny, and corruption by which he is surrounded on earth, and which no individual effort could hope to overcome; it came to declare to him, The world is adverse to thee; renounce the world and put thy faith in Christ; this will lead thee to heaven.
The new formula of life and its law—unknown at that day, but revealed to us in our own day by our knowledge of the tradition of humanity, confirmed by the voice of individual conscience, by the intuition of genius and the grand results of scientific research—may be summed up in the single word Progress,[D] which we now know to be, by Divine decree, the inherent tendency of human nature,—whether manifested in the individual or the collective being,—and destined, more or less speedily, but inevitably, to be evolved in time and space.
The logical consequences of the new formula are:—