Laudator Temporis Acti

Arthur Darby Nock, "The Study of the History of Religion," Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, Vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 331-340 (at 338):

You cannot read such a book as Westermarck's The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas without being deeply impressed by the continuity of the virtues in human history. You cannot, of course, read it without becoming aware of the extent to which the details of ethical codes vary in different ages and climes, and are a product of particular forms of social structure and of particular forms of fear and ignorance. You may regard the checks which are so commonly placed on the sexual instinct as explicable from physiological and ritual considerations. But you cannot deny that you find them in some shape almost everywhere. And, what is more important, you find the same generosity, the same hospitality, the same truthfulness, the same respect for legitimate authority held in honour over the world.

Furthermore, you will find in the whole story a notable measure of continuity in general. The prophetic innovators of whom we have spoken have nearly all proved to come not to destroy but to fulfil. The movements which sprang from their teaching have nearly all conserved the values which existed in the traditions with which they broke.

Id. (at 339):

It is possible to maintain the unbending supernaturalism of the Catholic Church frankly as a thing revealed to man from without and resting on a divine gift of faith. Here it is all or nothing; one concession would invalidate everything, for it is of the essence of the system that reason is the handmaid of faith, concerned to study and understand what is given to it by faith. This majestic structure is likely to have a very long life as it stands; if I were to have a chance of seeing the world in 2432, by the time machine of H.G. Wells or some similar device, I should confidently expect to find the Latin Mass being said with the same gestures and dogmatic theology being taught according to the principles of St. Thomas Aquinas. The uncompromising nature of Catholicism, its perfect because unconscious correspondence to the needs and aspirations of ordinary humanity, its very otherness are its guarantee of survival. Protestantism is in a very different position. Its basic theory, that it represents a return to the Gospel or to the primitive church, has not stood investigation, and it is from its very nature, from its championship of individual judgment, unable to oppose a fiat of authority to the findings of scholarship. It has to stand before the world absolutely on its own merits, as a frank and deliberate compromise between tradition, or, if you prefer it, revelation and reason; and when you make such a compromise you cannot cry, Stop.

Nock's essay was originally published in the Hibbert Journal 31 (1933) 605-615. How inaccurate his prophecy about the Catholic Church has proved to be! The head of that church did his utmost to limit the celebration of the traditional Latin Mass a few months ago in the ironically named Traditionis custodes. The seeds of destruction almost always sprout from within.