How to Read Layer II

The Criterion in One Sentence

Layer II names doctrines with deep, broad, historically dominant reception across the major magisterial traditions. It does not claim universal contemporary confession, and it does not claim dogmatic irreformability.

This sentence is the door. It is reproduced at the head of every Layer II document. Read it three times before reading anything in this layer, because every objection a careful reader will raise has its answer here.

The first half makes a positive claim about the past and the present’s inheritance from the past. Deep means the doctrine is rooted in patristic witness, not late innovation. Broad means it is held across the geographic and confessional families of the Body, not within one tradition alone. Historically dominant means the burden of proof has rested on the dissenter, not the affirmer, across the centuries the Church has actually existed.

The second half makes two negative claims that protect Layer II from being misread. It does not claim universal contemporary confession: the corpus knows perfectly well that contemporary Reformed congregations do not pray for the dead, that contemporary Baptists do not baptise infants, that contemporary low-church evangelicals do not venerate icons. The criterion measures the witness of the magisterial Body across time, not the consensus of every congregation in 2026. And it does not claim dogmatic irreformability: Layer II is not Layer I. The Council of Nicaea defined the homoousion irreformably; no council ever defined the perpetual virginity of Mary as binding on every conscience under pain of anathema in the same way. Layer II names what the Body has confessed, not what the Body has irreformably defined.

These two negatives are not weakening manoeuvres. They are the discipline that lets Layer II make a real claim without having to defend a claim it never made.

What Layer II Is Not

Layer II sits between four other things, and it is most usefully understood by what it is not.

It is not Layer I. Layer I is the Vincentian floor — quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus. The eight loci of Layer I are confessed across every historic magisterial branch with no serious dissent in any age. Layer II’s standard is lower and is honest about it. The criterion for Layer I is the threefold test — Scripture, ecumenical conciliar anchor, and tradition-formulary attestation in every tradition family. Layer II’s criterion is fourfold attestation across five families with minority dissent confined to a minority position within the dissenting tradition. Layer II is the broad ring of conviction surrounding the floor; it is not the floor.

It is not Layer III. Layer III names legitimate diversity — the places where traditions differ in emphasis, register, or practice without making contradictory truth-claims. The forensic and transformative registers of justification, the variety of polities, the variety of liturgical calendars. Layer III is what the Body holds in common at a deeper level than its visible variations. Layer II is doctrinal content; Layer III is doctrinal grammar. A doctrine in Layer II may be expressed differently across traditions, but the doctrine itself is the same. A matter in Layer III is a difference of expression, not of substance.

It is not Layer IV. Layer IV names the real faultlines — the dozen places where the Body is divided by genuinely incompatible truth-claims. Papal infallibility, the Filioque, transubstantiation, the Marian dogmas of 1854 and 1950, sola Scriptura, the essence-energies distinction. These cannot be reconciled without revision by at least one side. Layer II’s items, by contrast, are not contradicted in their substance by any major tradition; what is contested is at the margins, in the late-modern reception, or in the application. Layer II is broad consensus; Layer IV is structural division. Confusing the two is the most common misreading of the corpus.

It is not a verdict on contemporary confession. A reader who scans Layer II’s eighteen items and finds her congregation does not affirm half of them is not therefore outside the catholic consensus. She is encountering, often for the first time, the breadth of what the Body has confessed before her. The corpus does not adjudicate whose confession is right. It curates what the historic Body has held, names where dissent appears and from whom, and leaves the work of reception to her, her pastor, and her tradition.

The Kinds of Consensus Within Layer II

A reader who treats Layer II as a flat list of eighteen items will fail to see how the items relate to each other. The items are not all the same kind of agreement. Five distinguishable kinds of consensus are at work, and most Layer II items participate in more than one.

A note before the categories. They are heuristic tools, not ecclesiological self-descriptions native to every tradition. The Eastern Church does not partition “dogmatic” from “liturgical” consensus, since for the East lex orandi est lex credendi — what is prayed in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and the Liturgy of St. Basil is what is believed, and the conciliar horoi arise from and return to the Eucharist (Schmemann, For the Life of the World; Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church”). The categories below are offered for analytic clarity across families, not as any one tradition’s self-account. The corpus also acknowledges that where Rome and Orthodoxy have, in subsequent magisterial reception, raised a Layer II item to the level of a doctrinal claim — as Nicaea II did for icons, as the Marian magisterial tradition has done for perpetual virginity — that further dogmatic stratum belongs to those traditions’ own development of doctrine and is treated in Layer IV. Layer II names the broad reception; it does not flatten the further definition.

Dogmatic Consensus

The doctrine is affirmed in confessional formularies as binding teaching across at least four of the five magisterial traditions. The tradition’s Catechism, Confession, Articles, or conciliar acts treat the doctrine as part of the deposit of faith, not as adiaphora.

Layer II items: New Testament Canon (universal, no contested book among the magisterial traditions); the Real Presence — affirmed as the fact of Christ’s substantial presence under the Eucharistic species (the mode — transubstantiation for Rome per Trent Session XIII canons 1–4 and DH 1651–1652, metabole for the East, sacramental union for Lutheranism, Reformed reception by the power of the Spirit per WCF 29.7 — belongs to Layers III and IV); the Visible Church as necessary; Marriage as lifelong; the Authority of Ecumenical Councils (the principle, not the precise list); the Intermediate State.

Liturgical Consensus

The practice has shaped the Body’s worship for the entire patristic and medieval period and is received as constitutive of the Church’s life of prayer, not as decorative supplement.

Layer II items: Liturgical Worship as normative; the Sign of the Cross; the Communion of Saints as expressed liturgically. These have lasted through every historic schism; their abandonment has correlated with departure from the magisterial stream, not with a recovery of the apostolic. The Book of Common Prayer’s retention of these forms across the sixteenth-century Anglican reformation, against more thoroughgoing Reformed liturgical revision, is one clear demonstration that liturgical consensus survives confessional realignment.

Disciplinary Consensus

The matter is one of church order — what the Church does in its visible governance and in the rule of life it asks of its members. The Church has authority to legislate it. Differences in particular legislation are real, but the principle of legislated practice is uncontested across the magisterial traditions.

Layer II items: Episcopal Governance as normative; the Threefold Ministry (bishop, presbyter, deacon); Obligatory Fasting; the Sacramental Character of Ordination. These are not adiaphora. They are the Church’s order, and the historic Body has held them in common until the modern reductions.

Devotional Consensus

The practice has been universally received as lawful and salutary in the Body’s devotional life, though it is not the same kind of claim as a dogmatic definition. Its lawfulness has been challenged in particular periods and traditions; its dogmatic status has not been the subject of an irreformable definition binding on every Christian conscience.

Layer II items: the Intercession of the Saints; the Efficacy of Prayer for the Dead; the Lawfulness of Religious Images; the Sign of the Cross (which is also liturgical); aspects of the Communion of Saints.

Historical-Reception Consensus

The doctrine was confessed by the magisterial Body, including the magisterial Reformers themselves, as part of the inheritance received from the early and medieval Church. Modern reception is weaker, but the criterion measures the witness of the formularies and the magisterial sources, not the contemporary practice of the average congregation.

Layer II items: the Perpetual Virginity of Mary (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli all retained it, with explicit witness in their own writings and in the Reformation-era confessions where it is named); aspects of the Intermediate State; the broader patristic-Marian consensus inherited and qualified by the Reformers but not denied by them.

These five kinds of consensus are not mutually exclusive. The Sign of the Cross is liturgical and devotional. Marriage as lifelong is dogmatic and disciplinary. Religious Images are dogmatic for Rome and Orthodoxy after Nicaea II and devotional for Anglicans and Lutherans in practice. The point of the taxonomy is not to slot each item into a single box but to surface the shape of the agreement so that a reader does not confuse a liturgical-devotional consensus with a dogmatic-irreformable one. They are different kinds of agreement, and they bear different theological weight.

Where Layer II Will Be Tested

Four items in Layer II will draw the most fire. Each deserves an honest accounting before the reader enters the eighteen documents.

Prayer for the Dead

The consensus claim. The living may and should pray for the faithful departed; such prayer is attested in the earliest extant liturgies, including the Apostolic Tradition, the Liturgy of St. James, and the Roman Canon as preserved in the Apostolic Constitutions. Augustine prayed for his mother in Book IX of the Confessions. For the East the practice is not extrinsic to dogma but lodged in the Anaphora itself (“Again we offer unto Thee this reasonable worship for those who repose in faith…”), in the Diptychs, in the Saturday memorials, and in the Pannychida. The practice was universal until the sixteenth century.

The dissenting position. The Reformed tradition, drawing on its concerns about late-medieval purgatorial doctrine, the sufficiency of Christ’s mediation, and the satispassion-and-merit economy of the West, removed prayer for the dead from public worship. The Westminster Standards do not name the practice in order to legislate against it polemically, but their wider rule is not bare silence: the Confession teaches that the souls of the righteous, made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens immediately upon death (WCF 32.1), and the Larger Catechism, treating the parts of prayer, directs intercession to be offered for “all sorts of men living, or that shall live hereafter; but not for the dead” (WLC 183). The Reformed restraint is therefore considered confessional discipline, not undertheorized silence. The Anglican formularies hold the question in a particular tension: Article XXII of 1571 condemns “the Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory” — that is, the late-medieval theology of satispassion and the treasury of merits — but the Book of Common Prayer retains commendation of the departed in the Burial Office and prayer for the whole state of Christ’s Church in the eucharistic intercession. The classical Lutheran tradition, similarly, rejected the medieval purgatorial economy without, in its earliest practice, abolishing simple prayer for the departed; the discriminating word in the Anglican Article and in much Lutheran reception is Romish — aimed at a specific late-medieval system, not at the patristic practice. The Reformed objection is theologically serious — not eccentric — and is rooted in the same impulse that produced solus Christus.

Why it remains in Layer II. The criterion measures broad, deep, historically dominant reception. The patristic, medieval, Eastern, and Western practice meets that test by a wide margin. The modern Reformed dissent is named and not minimised. But the corpus does not erase the first fifteen centuries of unanimous practice because one tradition family revised the practice in the sixteenth. Prayer for the dead in Layer II is devotional and liturgical consensus broadly construed. The contested theology of the practice belongs to Layer IV — and is contested precisely along the seam between the Latin doctrine of purgatory as a place of expiatory satisfaction and the Eastern eucharistic theology of the departed, which is not purgatorial in the Latin sense and which is older and more conciliar than the developed Latin doctrine. Layer IV is therefore not “whether prayer for the dead has any theology” but “whether the Latin doctrine of purgatory rightly articulates the catholic practice.” Layer II names that the practice has been held; Layer IV names where the substantive disagreement lies.

Religious Images

The consensus claim. The use of images in worship and devotion is not idolatry. The Second Council of Nicaea (787, the Seventh Ecumenical Council; DH 600–603) defined this against the iconoclasts, distinguishing the latreia — the adoration due to the divine nature alone — from the proskynesis timētikē (the relative or honorific veneration) given to icons; in the conciliar formula, the honour given to the image passes to the prototype it represents (echoing St. Basil). For Rome and Orthodoxy this is christological before it is aesthetic: the Word having taken flesh may be circumscribed in matter (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images I.16; Theodore the Studite, Antirrhetici). The icon is not a decoration of orthodoxy but a confession of the Incarnation.

The dissenting position. The Reformed tradition, drawing on the second commandment as it understood the prohibition of images, formally rejected the veneration of images and, in stricter readings, the making of images of God or of Christ at all. The Westminster Larger Catechism Question 109 is direct: among the sins forbidden in the second commandment is “the making any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever; all worshipping of it, or God in it or by it; the making of any representation of feigned deities, and all worship of them, or service belonging to them.” The Westminster divines understand the commandment to forbid not only idolatrous worship but also the making of images of God for any religious use; the objection is therefore not first a worship objection but a fabrication objection (cf. WCF 21.1, HC Q. 96–98). The Reformed reading is a different reading of Scripture’s commandment, taken with full seriousness. The Anglican formularies occupy a distinguishable position: Article XXII condemns the same “Romish Doctrine… of Worshipping, and Adoration… of Images” — that is, the cultus the Reformers believed had collapsed the Nicene distinction between latreia and proskynesis in popular medieval practice — but the Anglican tradition retained didactic and devotional images, stained glass, the Crucifix, and figural ornament; the Caroline Divines defended the practice; the BCP makes liturgical use of the sign and image of the Cross. The classical Lutheran tradition retained images more straightforwardly, against Karlstadt’s iconoclasm, with Luther’s own writings as the locus.

Why it remains in Layer II. The corpus distinguishes carefully. Images as didactic and artistic — depicting biblical scenes for instruction, ornamenting churches, illustrating manuscripts — has been broadly received across the magisterial traditions, including the Reformed tradition’s own publishing of illustrated Bibles. Icons as liturgically venerated is the Roman and Orthodox practice that Nicaea II defined christologically. The strict iconoclasm that rejects all images of God or Christ is held with integrity by a strand within the Reformed tradition; the corpus does not, by including the broader practice, judge the Westminster reading of the Second Commandment to be idolatry of the imagination. Where Layer II names the breadth of the practice, Layer IV names the contested doctrine of proskynesis and the Christological reasoning of Nicaea II that Rome and Orthodoxy receive as binding ecumenical conciliar teaching.

Bishops: Normative, Not Necessary

The consensus claim. Episcopal government — bishops exercising oversight in continuity with the apostolic ministry of the early Church — is the historic and normative structure of the Body. The threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter, and deacon is attested from the apostolic period (Ignatius’s letters, c. 110) and was practiced universally until the sixteenth century. Whether that continuity is constituted by tactile succession of order, by succession in the apostolic faith and ministry, or by both held together is a Layer IV question; Layer II names the practice and pattern.

The Eastern witness, named on its own terms. For the East, the local Church is gathered around the bishop (or his presbyter offering on the bishop’s antimens), and there is no Eucharist apart from this bond. As Ignatius of Antioch writes: Where the bishop is, there is the catholic Church (Smyrnaeans 8). The bishop is the eikon of Christ at the Eucharist (Ignatius, Magnesians 6; Cyprian, De unitate; Zizioulas, Being as Communion). For Orthodoxy, episcopate is not a contingent norm overlaid on the Church but the visible form of its eucharistic life. That this dogmatic claim is contested is Layer IV territory; what Layer II names is the universal practice up to the sixteenth century.

The dissenting position. Presbyterian and congregational polities reject the necessity of bishops as a distinct order possessing apostolic succession. They affirm episkopē (oversight) as a function of the church’s eldership; they reject episcopate as a distinct office. The Reformed tradition’s Westminster polity is presbyterian; many evangelical traditions are congregational. This is not a recent oversight: it is a considered theological position grounded in particular readings of Acts 20:28 and Titus 1:5–7, where elder and bishop appear as overlapping categories.

The spread among the magisterial traditions that retain the threefold ministry. The weight given to the historic episcopate itself varies. The Anglican formularies place it close to the necessary end of the spectrum: the Preface to the Ordinal of 1662 declares that “from the Apostles’ time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church; Bishops, Priests, and Deacons,” and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886/1888) names “the Historic Episcopate, locally adapted” as one of the four conditions for the visible reunion of Christendom — a stronger commitment than adiaphora. The Lutheran tradition occupies a more divided position: the Augsburg Confession (Art. XIV) requires only a regular call (rite vocatus) for public ministry; the Smalcald Articles are open to episcopal order without requiring it; the Swedish, Finnish, and parts of the German Lutheran inheritance retained the historic episcopate, while most American Lutheran bodies treat it as adiaphora. Layer II names what these traditions hold in common — the threefold ministry as historic and normative — without flattening the real spread on whether the historic episcopate is constitutive of the Church’s order.

Why “normative” and not “necessary.” This is the most important word in the entire Layer II vocabulary. The corpus says episcopal government is normative — the historical and continuing pattern across most of the Body — but it does not say at Layer II that episcopal government is necessary for the existence of the Church. The latter claim is what the Reformed tradition rejects, and it is not the claim Layer II makes. The claim that valid sacramental ministry — and in particular a valid Eucharistic consecration — requires episcopal ordination in apostolic succession is what Apostolicae Curae (1896, Leo XIII; DH 3315–3319) decided regarding Anglican orders, what Lumen Gentium §28 teaches positively, and what the CDF reaffirmed in subsequent responses; for Rome this is not a contingent disciplinary preference but a matter touching the valid confection of the sacrament. That is Layer IV territory — the document on Apostolic Succession. Layer II names the practice; Layer IV names the dogmatic claims about the practice. Mistaking the first for the second is to confuse the two layers.

The Perpetual Virginity of Mary

The consensus claim. Mary remained virgin throughout her life. This was the universal teaching of the patristic period from at least the fourth century. For the East, Aeiparthenos (Ever-Virgin) is not a deduction from later Mariological development but a title received in the conciliar acts themselves: at Constantinople II (553) the title is used in the conciliar definition; the Theotokos of Ephesus (431) is, in the East’s reception, inseparable from the Ever-Virgin of liturgical confession. The doctrine is rooted in the patristic-Greek tradition — the Protoevangelium of James, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, John of Damascus — received West and East alike. The Lateran Synod of 649 (canon 3, DH 503) defined the aeiparthenos against those who denied it; Trent’s Profession of Faith and the Catechism of the Council of Trent both teach it; and the doctrine is held by the ordinary universal magisterium of the Catholic Church (CCC §§499–501) as de fide even absent an extraordinary papal definition like the Immaculate Conception (1854) or the Assumption (1950). Layer II is not Layer I in the strictest sense; Rome’s stance is that the doctrine is binding within Roman dogmatic teaching, while the layer’s standard is broader than Rome’s de fide status alone.

The Reformation-era reception. Every major magisterial Reformer retained the doctrine. Luther preached it in 1532 and held it to the end of his life. Calvin, expounding Matthew 1:25 in the Harmony of the Evangelists, judged it unwarranted to wring from the verse what it does not contain — that Mary bore other children — and treated adelphoi in Matthew 13:55 as kin rather than uterine brothers in line with the patristic reading; he refuses the contrary inference and treats the argument from “knew her not until” as without weight, even where he does not press a positive confession. Luther’s affirmation is the more emphatic. The Formula of Concord (Solid Declaration VIII.24) confesses Mary as “the most blessed Virgin Mary, semper virgo,” in the context of the communicatio idiomatum — the term doing christological work, not independently mariological work, but doing it. Zwingli affirmed the doctrine. Classical Anglican divines (Andrewes, Pearson, Beveridge) affirmed it; the BCP Marian feasts retain it in liturgical form.

The dissenting position. Modern Protestantism, especially after the eighteenth century, weakened on the question. Many contemporary evangelical and Reformed congregations do not affirm it; some explicitly deny it; many simply do not raise it. The contemporary Protestant lay reception is significantly weaker than the magisterial Protestant teaching of the sixteenth century.

Why it remains in Layer II. Here the criterion does its sharpest work. Layer II measures reception across the magisterial traditions in their authoritative formulation, not the contemporary lay practice of any tradition. By that measure, the perpetual virginity is unanimously affirmed across Rome, Orthodoxy, the Anglican formularies, classical Lutheran teaching, and the Magisterial Reformers themselves. The modern Protestant weakening is named explicitly; it is not erased. But the criterion does not invert because contemporary reception has shifted. If it did, Layer II would become a poll of present opinion rather than a witness to historic confession. This is historical-reception consensus in its sharpest form. The reader for whom the modern Protestant weakening is normative will find Layer II’s standard surprising; that surprise is the work of the layer, and it is not undone by accommodation.

On the Tradition-Specific Frictions Layer II Will Produce

The reviewer of the corpus rightly noticed that Layer II is the layer where Reformed readers will object most sharply, and that several of the objections (prayer for the dead, religious images, perpetual virginity, the necessity of episcopate) cluster in the Reformed tradition’s confessional inheritance.

The corpus declines to write a “Where a Reformed reader will object” page. That kind of page would centre one tradition’s reception as the reference frame against which Layer II is being defended. The corpus does not have a reference frame in that sense; it speaks across traditions, not from any one of them.

But the Reformed objection is not therefore ignored. It is engaged in three structural places:

• In each Layer II document’s “Where the Accent Differs” section, where the major tradition-specific receptions and qualifications are named with their formularies cited.
• In Layer III, where the forensic and transformative registers of justification are held as legitimate diversity, honouring the Reformed tradition’s specific gift to the Body without flattening it.
• In Layer IV, where the substantive Reformed–Roman faultlines are named directly: the doctrine of justification (the JDDJ of 1999 has narrowed but not closed the gap; cf. Annex §2C), sola Scriptura against Scripture-and-Tradition, the deuterocanonical books, the Marian dogmas of 1854 and 1950, transubstantiation, the validity of orders, and the Petrine and infallibility claims of Pastor Aeternus (Vatican I, DH 3050–3075).

The Reformed reader who finds Layer II’s inclusions difficult should read those documents. The corpus’s substantive disagreements with the Roman and Eastern positions, where they exist, are in Layer IV, not absent from the corpus. That the Reformed position is not the centre of Layer II is not a slight to the Reformed tradition. It is the consequence of the criterion the layer applies — a criterion that, taken seriously, will also push back against any other tradition’s tendency to treat its own current reception as the universal standard.

A particular caution is owed at this point. Rome and the Christian East stand toward Layer II in a different way than the Reformation traditions do, because Rome and the East confess that several Layer II items — the historic episcopate as constitutive of the Church’s apostolicity, the Marian Theotokos-and-Ever-Virgin tradition, the eucharistic conversion — are not broadly received doctrines they happen to share but are constitutive of the Church’s identity. Lumen Gentium §8 confesses that the one Church of Christ subsistit in the Catholic Church; Dominus Iesus §17 (CDF, 2000) distinguishes “particular Churches” (the Eastern Orthodox, with valid sacraments and apostolic succession) from “ecclesial Communities” (most Reformation bodies, where the defect of orders bears on the ecclesial nature itself). The taxonomy of “five families” used in this corpus is a working tool, not an ecclesiological claim; the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Communion each understand themselves not as one denomination among several but as the Church catholic in continuity with the apostles, and their participation in any aggregated consensus-claim is governed by the principle of the Toronto Statement (WCC, 1950) that ecumenical participation does not entail mutual recognition as Church. Layer II’s symmetrical framing, useful as it is for the corpus’s purpose, must not be read as Rome’s or Orthodoxy’s own self-understanding of the asymmetry between these receptions.

The frictions are real, named, and even-handed. The Roman reader will find Layer II declines to underwrite the Marian definitions of 1854 and 1950 as Layer II content (those are Layer IV); the Eastern reader will find that Layer II’s analytic categories are Western in grammar and that the essence-energies distinction is not adjudicated; the Anglican reader will find the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral neither imported wholesale nor displaced; the Lutheran reader will find the communicatio idiomatum not pressed into a Layer II claim and adiaphora discomfort with calling fasting “obligatory” honoured by the qualifier “obligatory as the Church has prescribed it”; the Reformed reader will find Layer II inclusions she does not affirm but the page named her dissent as confession and not as eccentricity. The discipline of the layer is even-handed, or it is nothing.

For Reception and Correction

This explainer, like every document in the corpus, is offered for reception and correction. Layer II is the layer most likely to be contested. The corpus invites that contest. Where the inclusion criterion has been misapplied, where a specific item has been placed at the wrong layer, where a kind-of-consensus tag is the wrong tag for an item, the correction is welcomed. The corpus is a draft of a witness, not a closed book.

What the corpus will not do — and what this page is partly written to make explicit — is collapse the distinction between Layer II’s broad historical reception and Layer I’s universal floor, or between Layer II’s confession and Layer IV’s irreformable definition, or between Layer II’s witness across the centuries and any one tradition’s contemporary lay practice. Those distinctions are what make the corpus useful. Without them, Layer II becomes either too thin (a flat lowest-common-denominator) or too thick (a Roman or Eastern claim being smuggled into the catholic consensus). With them, Layer II names what it actually names: the broad ring of conviction surrounding the dogmatic core, contested at its edges and faithfully held at its centre by the Body across time.

The Body has confessed these things together — en mia kardia kai mia psychē, with one heart and one soul (Acts 4:32). That is what Layer II names: not a treaty negotiated between traditions, but the convergence of the Church’s voice as it has actually prayed, taught, and suffered. The reader who reads the eighteen documents in light of this page will, the corpus hopes, find both more agreement and more honest disagreement than the modern situation has led her to expect.