Laudator Temporis Acti

Ronald A. Knox (1888-1957), Occasional Sermons (New York: Sheed & Ward Inc., 1960), pp. 47-48:

[E]very new thing in human history is built against the background of some older thing which went before it. As the picture gallery of some great house preserves the memory of its ancestry, tracing down to the latest instance the persistence of the same characteristics, and linking up the present with the past; so the greatest institutions of the world are those which combine something ancient with something new. And among these, even the Catholic Church.

It is a human weakness of ours to be always crying out for complete novelty, an entire disseverance from our past. Our old traditions have become so dusty with neglect, so rusted with abuse, that we are for casting them on the scrap-heap and forgetting that they ever existed. The Church conserves; she bears traces still of the Jewish atmosphere in which she was cradled; traces, too, of the old heathen civilization which she conquered. And in her own history it is the same; nothing is altogether forgotten; every age of Christianity recalls the lineaments of an earlier time. People think of her as if she kept a lumber-room; it is not so; hers is a treasure-house from which she can bring forth when they are needed things old as well as new.