Once upon a time there was a set of propositions that made up the Faith. Not everyone knew even most of these propositions; not even the pope knew all of them, for they weren't all uttered yet, and perhaps some later pope would promulgate a proposition that the present pope didn't know, except of course implicitly;for we all—unless we were heretics—held implicitly all the true propositions of Faith there could be, right to the end of time. There were many difficult problems: those that gathered round the early chapters of Genesis—the woman fashioned out of a rib, the talking serpent, the ages of the patriarchs; those that arose from reflection upon the history of the church—the rough and depraved and inadequate men who had held the Roman bishopric from time to time, the prevalence historically of an attachment (thought down to modern times almost a badge of orthodoxy) to the practice of religious persecution.