A church cannot serve two masters. It cannot peacefully coexist with truths and falsities. To want to live with both and to seek a compromise will cause the church to be laid to waste. The church will perish, and the goods and truths of the Word will be taken away from it.

642. These considerations make clear what is embodied in this first description of the ark which shows that it was constructed from 'planks of gopher', had 'rooms', and was 'bitumened with bitumen outside and in', namely that the second part, which is that of the will, was preserved from the deluge, and that the only part open was that of the understanding, which is described in verse 16 by the window, the door, and the lowest, second, and third storeys. These matters are perhaps hard to believe because they have not as yet entered anybody's thinking, and because people have no such conception of the Word of the Lord. Nevertheless they are absolutely true. Yet these are the least and most general of the arcana that mankind does not know. If the details were told them they would not grasp a single one.