It is perfectly acceptable to marshal seemingly unrelated facts to support a thesis, but in his recent op-ed piece ("Cardinal Newman: Our contemporary," Dec. 3) David Lewis Stokes Jr. resorts to forensic sleight of hand when he piggy-backs the obviously absurd notion of human perfectability onto an empirically defensible belief that he thereupon summarily dismisses: "humanity and divinity occupy the same continuum."

Besides, he is incorrect in assigning this latter idea to the 18th Century Enlightenment; it goes back at least as far as Galileo’s discovery that the cosmos is a single, all-inclusive entity. As the eminent English theologian Don Cupitt puts it, the world we live in is "outsideless."

Indeed, the idea goes back some 1,600 years before that. Jesus seems to have recognized that humanity cannot be separate from that which it conceives of as eternal. In the Parable of the Leaven (Matt. 13:33 / Luke 13:20-21), widely judged to be one of the more authentic Gospel ascriptions, he asserts that the coming of God’s kingdom will require a radical fusion of the sacred — indelibly symbolized by three measures of flour — and the secular — represented by the ritually impure leaven.

To be sure, this is merely the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, a category of moral instruction soon superseded by that of speculative theologians like Father Stokes’s antecedents, who posthumously elevated the Galilean prophet to divine status and made themselves his spokesmen.

Still, I prefer the original insight. Denounce liberalism all you will, Father Stokes; like democracy, to which it gave rise, it has limited appeal to those who favor the secure life offered by authority. I, however, would rather deal with the imperfect reality of this world than buy into a system based on arbitrary laws and enforced by claims of inerrancy.

TOM HALL

Foster