Nor is it an institutional device to be constantly modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual concept. Nor must it be ossified by endless regulation.
We should never act blindly without assessing how conditions have evolved or allow ourselves to become ossified or closed off, nor should we mechanically imitate others or indiscriminately absorb foreign ideas.
Early Christianity helped the masses free themselves from the power of the ossified imperial regime and from an ideology that could give meaning only to the lives of the rich and the powerful.