Old Lutheran Quote of the Day

The identity of the Church's faith resembles not the sameness of a rock, but rather the living identity of a man. The babe and the adult are identical. They are the same being in different stages of maturity: that which constitutes the individual does not change. The child does not grow to adult maturity by any change in personal identity - but retaining that identity grows by its attraction to itself of that which is consonant with its own unchanged nature. Adult perfection is reached not by amputations and ingraftings, but by growth, in which the identifying energy conforms everything to its own nature. -- C. P. Krauth, *The Conservative Reformation* p. 270