CHAPTER IX. THE SECOND MAN VERIFIED IN HISTORY.

“Magnum principium, et regni ejus non erit finis. Deus fortis, dominator, princeps pacis.”

In order to complete the view taken in the preceding chapter of the work of Christ as the second Adam over against the work of the first Adam, it is necessary to dwell at greater length upon a point of which only cursory mention was made therein. It was our object there to bring out the relation of Christ to the Church, but this cannot be done without fully exhibiting the relation to the same Church of the Holy Spirit. To the Incarnation the Fathers in general give the title of the Dispensation of the Son, and as the equivalent, the result, the complement and crown of this Dispensation, they put the Giving of the Spirit.(91) This Giving of the Spirit occupies the whole region of grace, and is coextensive with the whole action of the Incarnate God upon men whom He has taken to be His brethren. The Holy Spirit in this Giving is He who represents the Redeemer, and executes His will, not as an instrument, not as one subordinate, but as the very mind of Christ between whom and Christ there can far less enter any notion of division or separation than between a man and his own spirit. He is that other Paraclete, abiding for ever, who replaces to the disciples the visible absence of the first Paraclete, the Redeemer Himself: He is the Power constituting the Kingdom of Christ; the Godhead inhabiting His Temple; the Soul animating His mystical Body; the Charity, kindling into a living flame the heart of His Bride; the Creator and Father of His Race.

This connection between the Dispensation of the Son and the Giving of the Spirit was delineated by our Lord himself when He first appeared to His assembled disciples after His resurrection. As they were gazing in wonder and trembling joy on that Body which had undergone His awful passion, as He showed them the wounds in His hands and His feet, He told them how His sufferings were the fulfilment of all that in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms had been written concerning Him. And thereupon it is said, He opened their mind to the understanding of these Scriptures. It was thus that the Christ was to suffer, it was thus that He was to rise again on the third day. Hitherto He has dwelt upon His own dispensation, as the fulfilment of all prophecy, now He proceeds to its fruit: that in the name of this Christ repentance and remission of sins should be proclaimed to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. “And you,” He says, “are the witnesses of these things. And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but stay you in the city of Jerusalem until you be endued with power from on high.” Again, at another occasion of equal solemnity, when He was with His assembled disciples in visible form for the last time, at the moment preceding His ascension, He uses the same emphatic words, charging them not to depart from the city, but to await there that promise of the Father, the baptism in the Holy Ghost, which they were to receive in common together, which was to be the power in virtue of which they should be His witnesses for all time unto the ends of the earth: the power which instead of restoring a local kingdom to Israel, as was in their thoughts when they questioned Him, was to create an universal kingdom to Him in the hearts of men. It is then as the result of His passion, and the token of His resurrection, that the Son sends down upon His disciples the promise of the Father, that is, the perpetual presence of the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the Spirit of Truth and Grace, that permanent and immanent power from on high, who, dwelling for ever in the disciples, makes the Church.

But these words, so singular and so forcible, which He uses on these two occasions, at His resurrection and His ascension, are themselves a reference to the long discourse which He had held with His apostles on the night of His passion. It is in this discourse, from the moment that Judas left them to the conclusion of the divine prayer—and if we can make any distinction in His words, surely these are the most solemn which were ever put together in human language, since they are the prayer not of a creature to the Creator, but the prayer of One divine Person to Another—it is in this discourse that He describes the power from on high with which, as the promise of the Father, He, the Son, would invest His disciples. It is here He says that He would ask the Father, who should give them another Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, to abide with them for ever: whom the world would not receive, nor see, nor know, but whom they should know, because He should abide with them and be in them. This other Paraclete, coequal therefore with Himself, whom the Father should send in His name, and whom He should send from the Father, the Spirit of holiness as well as the Spirit of truth, should teach them all things and remind them of all His teaching. And His coming, though invisible, should profit them more than His own visible presence. For while He declared Himself to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life,(92) He revealed to them here that it was by that very way that the Spirit of truth should lead them by the hand into all truth. It was in this Truth, that is, in Himself, that they should be sanctified, and that they should be one, the glory of the Incarnation, which had been given to Him, passing on to them as the members of His Body, by the joint possession of the spirit of truth and holiness, whose presence was the gage that the Father loved them, as He loved Christ, the Body being identified with the Head. In all this He was describing to them the work of that other Paraclete, His own Spirit, “who was to sanctify what He had redeemed, and to guard and maintain possession of what He had acquired.”(93) This is but a small portion of that abundant revelation, which our Lord then communicated to His apostles, concerning the Power from on high with which they were to be invested.

The words of our Lord to His apostles at the three great points of His passion, His resurrection, and His ascension, stand out beyond the rest in their appeal to our affections. The last words of a friend are the dearest, and these are the last words of the Bridegroom, and they are concerning His Bride. When He was Himself quitting His disciples He dwells upon the Power which was to create and maintain His Church, upon the gift of His Spirit, His other self, in which gift lay the formation of His kingdom. It is thus He expresses to us the point with which we started, that the Giving of His Spirit is the fulfilment of all that Dispensation wherein the eternal Word took human flesh.

It is not only then the unanimous voice of the Fathers which sets the Giving of the Spirit over against the Incarnation of the Son. They are but carrying on that which our Lord so markedly taught; their tradition was but the echo of His voice, as their life was the fulfilment of it.

But it was a double malady in man which God the Word became man to cure. It was the whole nature which was affected with a taint, and the soul through the whole race touched in both its powers of the intellect(94) and the will. That false worship which we have seen spreading through the earth, and that deep corruption of manners which was interlaced with it, were the symptoms of this malady. The perversion of the truth concerning the being of God, and all the duties of man which grow out of this being, was inextricably blended with the disregard of these duties in the actual conduct of man. It was in vain to set the truth before man’s intellect without a corresponding power to act upon his will. Therefore the apostle described the glory of the only-begotten Son, when He dwelt as man among us, by the double expression that He was “full of grace and truth.” Viewed as the Head of human nature, its Father and new beginning, He is the perpetual fountain to it of these two, which no law, not even one divinely given, could bestow. For the law could make nothing perfect, because it could not touch the will; and the law gave the shadow, but not the very truth of things. But when that unspeakable union of the divine nature with the human had taken effect in the unity of one Person, Truth and Grace had an everlasting human fountain in the created nature of the Incarnate Word. Now was the fountain to pour forth a perpetual stream upon the race assumed. And this it does by the descent of the Spirit. In this descent upon the assembled Church the Grace and Truth of the divine Head, with which His Flesh, carried by the Godhead, overstreams, find themselves a human dwelling in the race. Such an operation belongs only to the Divine Spirit, for God alone can so act upon the intellect and will of creatures as to penetrate them with His gifts of Truth and Grace, while He leaves them their free will, their full individuality, as creatures. This, then, was the range of that power with which our Lord foretold to His apostles that they should be invested, and for which He bade them wait. The whole field of truth as it respects the relation of God to His creatures as moral beings, and the whole extent of grace, as it touches the human will, for the performance of every act which a reasonable creature can execute, made up the extent of that divine indwelling in men which the Spirit of Christ assumed upon the day of Pentecost. This was the power of the Holy Ghost which then came down upon men. Through the whole divine discourse which preceded His passion, our Lord dwells upon this double power, referring to Himself as the Truth, to His Spirit as the Spirit of the Truth, to Himself as the Vine, and so that root of grace which should communicate its sap to the branches, and to His Spirit, who should take of His and give it to them; uniting both ideas of Truth and Grace in that one word, “Sanctify them in thy Truth,” that is by incorporation with me, who am the Truth, in my Spirit, who is the Truth. And so the eternal Word, having assumed a human Body, when He withdraws His corporal presence, proceeds to form that other human Body, the dwelling-place of His Spirit, in which His Truth and Grace are to become visible.

Thus the transfusion of Truth and Grace from the Incarnate Word to His mystical Body is the generic character of the Giving of the Spirit.

Two differential marks distinguish this giving from any which preceded the coming of our Lord.

First, the Spirit should come upon them, but should never depart from them. “He shall give you another Comforter, to abide with you for ever, the Spirit of Truth.” This giving was not an intermittent operation, whether extraordinary, such as had shown itself in Moses and the Prophets, for their inspiration in writing, or their guidance in particular trials, nor that ordinary one whereby from the beginning He had enabled all the good and just to lead a life acceptable to Him. It was a far higher gift,(95) wherein, as S. Augustine says, by the very presence of His majesty no longer the mere odour of the balsam, but the substance itself of the sacred unguent was poured into those vessels, making them His temple, and conveying that adoption in virtue of which they should not be left orphans, but have their Father invisibly with them for ever. No intermittent operation, and no presence less than that of His substance, would reach the force of the words used by our Lord, “I will ask the Father, and He shall send you another Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, to abide with you for ever;” for that word “other” conveys a comparison with Himself, from whom they had never been separated since He had called them, in whose continuance with them alone was their strength, their unity, their joint existence and mission, without whom they could do nothing. All this to them that “other” Paraclete was to be, in order that the departure of the Former Paraclete should be expedient for them. For in this continuity of His presence was involved the further gift that the Paraclete was to come to them as a Body, and because of this manner of coming He replaced the Former. Had He come to them only as individuals, they would have suffered a grievous loss, the loss of the Head who made them one. But He came to them as the Body of Christ, and by coming made them that Body, being the Spirit of the Head. That rushing mighty wind filled the whole house in which they were sitting, and they all were filled together with the presence; and as a sign that the old confusion and separation of mankind were in them to be done away, speaking in one tongue the one truth which was evermore to dwell with them, they were heard in all the various languages of the nations present at the feast. “The society by which men are made the one Body of the only Son of God belongs to the Spirit,”(96) and He came upon all together in one House to indicate, as He made, that one Body. “The mode of giving,” says S. Augustine, “was such as never before appeared. Nowhere do we read before that men congregated together had by receiving the Holy Ghost spoken with the tongues of all nations.”(97) “Therefore He came upon Pentecost as upon His birthday.”(98)

It is His presence alone which confers four gifts upon the body which He vivifies.

It was the will, says S. Augustine,(99) of the Father and the Son that we should have communion with each other and with Them by means of that which is common to Them, and by that gift to collect us into one, which, being one, They both have; that is to say, by the Holy Ghost, who is God, and the gift of God. For, says S. Thomas,(100) the unity of the Holy Spirit makes unity in the Church. It is not by similarity, or by juxtaposition, or by agreement, how much less by concessions and compromises, that unity exists in the body of Christ, but because the Spirit is one, because all gifts, however various, all functions, however distinct, are distributed by this One.

For the same reason truth dwells in this Body, because He is the Spirit of Truth. Our Lord Himself has defined His great function in this particular, to lead His disciples by the hand(101) into all truth, to teach all things, and remind of all things which made up His own teaching. This function began on the day of Pentecost, and lasts to the day of judgment, and belongs to the Body of Christ, and to it alone, and belongs to it because it is animated by the Spirit of Truth. And this animation is like the Head, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. It is not of any past time more or less than of the present or the future. It is the illumination which belongs to that whole last day, through which the Body of Christ grows, teaches, labours, and suffers, until the mortal day break into the light of eternity.

His third gift to the Body is that of charity, and for the same reason, because He is this Himself. He who is not only the Unity of the Father and the Son, but their mutual Love, coming as the gift of that Divine love which redeemed the world by the sacrifice of its Maker, and as the Spirit of that Love, who invested Himself with human flesh, creates in this human dwelling-place that one charity which bears His name, and is of His nature, and which in that one body joins the wills of men together as His Truth joins their intellects. If the Body of Christ has one prevailing charity, which reaches to all its members, and encompasses the least as well as the greatest, it is because the heart is divine.

The fourth gift which He bestows upon the Body is sanctification, and it may be said to be the result of the other three. This, again, is His own name and nature, and many have thought and said, His personal attribute, to make holy; and that, as Fathership indicates the First Person, and Sonship the Second, so the making holy names the Third, the bond of the most blessed Trinity. But this, at least, may be said to be the final cause of the body which He animates, the imparting of holiness. In virtue of this gift, all the means and aids and rules of holiness are stored up in the Body. And this does not mean that there is not a continual falling away from the rule and practice of holiness in particular members, but it means that while these, in spite of the Body’s nurture and solicitude, fall away from it and perish, the Body lasts for ever, the rules and aids and means of holiness lasting for ever within it, because it is the Body of the Spirit of holiness.

Now these four gifts, Unity, Verity, Charity, and Sanctity, can none of them exist in the Body without the other, and all of them exist together there, because they have one divine root, that indwelling of the Holy Spirit which is the fruit of the Incarnation, and whereby the mystical Body of Christ corresponds to His natural Body. Of this Body the beginning is Unity, the substance Truth, the bond Charity, the end Sanctity. Countless heresies and schisms have sought to break up the coinherence of these gifts, but in vain. The only success which the indwelling Spirit allows them is to detach from the Body those who are unworthy to remain in it, and to prolong for a time their maimed existence by some portion of some of His gifts. Truth, for instance, has such a vitality that many a heresy will live for ages on that fragment which it has detached from the mass; unity and charity have such force that even their shadow, that is, the joint possession of a fragmentary truth, and the good-will thence proceeding, will prolong for a time a sort of corporate existence. Holiness has so attractive a power, that zeal and self-denial, which present the seeming of it, will make the fortune of a sect for a time. But in the union and the completeness of these four gifts, the great Body of Christ stands out through all the ages inimitable and unapproachable. Alone it dares to claim them thus united and complete, for alone it can present their realisation.

These four gifts, then, dwell in the Body in a higher degree than that in which they adorn the members of the Body, as in it, by force of the Spirit’s indwelling, they ever exist together. Let us now see the qualities which the Spirit imparts to the members of the Body, by virtue of their incorporation into it.

First of all is the forgiveness of sins. The Spirit takes them out of that state of alienation in which they are born, and unites them to His Body; and in so doing He effaces both the birth-sin and every actual sin which they may have committed. This is that plenary forgiveness of sins, the pure gift of God unpreceded by any merit on man’s part, which greets the new-comer out of Adam’s body of sin into the Body of Christ. It is imparted by and from the Body, and to its members alone.

The second quality is that illumination of the mind, irradiated by the truth, the whole compass of which exists in the Body. This illumination is the root of the virtue of faith, by means of which the individual mind appropriates the divine truth presented to it. The force of the virtue differs in the individual as the keenness of sight in the natural man, but the visual power is the same in quality in all. By it the mind of the believer lays hold in ever varying degree, one more and one less, of that great harmony of truth which is held in its completeness, its manifold applications, and all but infinite relations, only by the Body. For the truth with which we deal is not unlocalised and scattered, the prey, as it were, of the individual mind, which can hunt it down and take it as a spoil, but it is a divine gift, orbed in the sphere which was created for it, the Body of that Word who is the Truth. Hence the first question to the applicant for baptism: What askest thou of the Church of God? and the answer is, Faith.

The third quality is the adoption of Sonship, which flows directly from incorporation into the Body of Christ, and to which man has no sort of title in himself or from his own nature, but which comes to him only by kindred with Him who, on the morning of His resurrection, greeted that great penitent who bore the figure of the Church with that paschal salutation of the Second Adam, “Go to my brethren, and say, I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God.” And the divine virtue of hope well corresponds to this quality, the effects of which in a state of trial and conflict are to so great a degree future and unseen. It seems, moreover, to be as a special link and tie between the virtue which purifies the intellect, and that which corrects the will and makes it obedient. Thus through it we pass on to the fourth quality of Sanctification, which is the completion of the other three and their end, the harmony of each individual will with the divine will, the work of charity. That divine virtue is the special fruit of the passion of Christ, which was to gather up into one what sin had disunited and torn away, first from its Author, and then from the order by Him created, which was to heal the animosities thus introduced, and to change the world from a conflict wherein each sought to better himself at the expense of his neighbour, into a community cemented together with mutual affection. It was with reason, therefore, that S. Augustine would not allow the possession of charity, save in the unity of that one Body which Christ had created,(102) and without charity there is no sanctification.

The four qualities thus slightly sketched, forgiveness of sins, illumination of faith, adoption to sonship, and sanctification by charity, which come to the individual by and with incorporation into the Body, are not given to him irrevocably, but are conditional upon his perseverance. They are portions and derivations of that vast treasure of Truth and Grace which the Body holds in their entireness and for ever, because of the perpetual indwelling of the Spirit who makes its life, but which He dispenses as it pleases Him to the members, and which He may withdraw from them in default of their coöperation. Vast are the losses thereby incurred, not to the treasure-house which remains inexhaustible, but to those who fall out of it back into the world, or rather that body of Adam from which they were taken. But these losses touch not the beauty and the glory of that Body of Christ, which goes on through the ages, and takes up its own, fulfils its appointed work, and reaches its intended end.

Thus on the day of Pentecost a new Power, the Spirit of the Incarnate God, descended not upon single men, but upon an assembly of men, binding it in a unity, conveying to it a truth, kindling in it a charity, and working through these a sanctification never before known; which Power, thenceforth dwelling in that Body, was to collect and draw into itself out of all nations and ranks of men those who should form the Church, that is, the Kingdom and Temple, and House, and Body, and Family of Christ. In it was to work and from it to go forth henceforward to all time the virtue of Him who had assumed our flesh, not transiently, but for ever; in the Head and the Body, through the life of His Spirit, Christ should teach and bear for ever that witness to the truth of which He spoke in the hall of Pilate, and concerning which He said that “this gospel of the kingdom should be proclaimed through the whole world, for a witness to all nations, and then that the end should come.”(103) To the continuance, the indissolubility, the purity of this power He has pledged His word in such a way that they who deny it must in doing so deny Him. He has even made the unity of this Body the special mark to men of the truth of His mission, beseeching His Father in that last prayer, “Neither pray I for these alone, but for those also who through their word shall believe in Me, that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me.”

There are three analogies(104) which illustrate this creation of our Lord—a creation in itself as singular as His assumption of man’s nature.

First, that of the relation between the soul and body. The soul is the life of the body; the body, as it were, the mansion and home of the soul, its bearer. Through the body the qualities of the soul become visible and known; its powers exercise themselves, and personal unity so binds the two together that we love or hate, admire or despise, the one for the sake of the other; the grief of the soul acts upon the body, the sickness of the body depresses the soul. Through the acts of the body we learn the very existence of the soul, and in these acts it portrays itself. Human nature has been so made by its Creator that the qualities of soul and body, of spirit and matter, are imputed in the individual man to each other. Now to the Body we have been considering the Spirit of Christ is, as it were, the soul. It is nothing strange, then, if it was His will to create such a Body, if it be the result of His Incarnation, that the like effects which exist in the case of every human soul and body should take place here. To this Body also the power and virtue of its soul are communicated; and, since Christ by His Spirit animates it, in honouring it He is honoured; in despising it, He is despised. There is an imparting to it of the qualities which He has; and thus it is that unity and sanctity, truth and charity dwell in it as the operation of His mind. Thus every man contains in himself, in the union of soul and body, an image of that tie by which Christ and His Church are one.

Secondly, because God has created man for society, He has implanted in him an irrepressible instinct of communion with his brother men. This instinct it is which, under circumstances of every possible variety, results in one end, the State. The human commonwealth, whatever external shape it wear, whatever division of its powers it make, springs from this. In virtue of this original formation of man, that he is made to live together, and gregariously, not separately, the supreme power of government, the power of life and death, dwells in the community, and obedience to it has a divine sanction. Thus, the commonwealth has a variety of powers which the individual has not, and not only so, but it also has powers which do not arise from the mere aggregation of individuals, rather which belong to it as a community, as a whole, for instance, sovereignty in all the details of its exercise. But now the very object for which Christ became Incarnate was to constitute a divine commonwealth. He is the King: it is the tenderness of a God Incarnate that He calls and makes His Kingdom His Body. The powers, then, which belong to the earthly commonwealth belong, with the changes which the change of subject carries, to the Divine. They who have so great a reverence for human government, who respect in the nation an ultimate irresponsible power, ought, if they were consistent, when they acknowledge Christ as having come in the flesh, to acknowledge His government in the kingdom which He has set up. All that his country is to the patriot, the Church is to the Christian, but in so much higher a degree, as the object for which Christ came is above the needs and cares of this present life. Has the City of God, then, less claim upon Christians than the City of Romulus had upon Romans? Thus, in the natural duty of the citizen, as well as in the compound nature of man, is contained a reminder of the Christian’s relation to the Church, and a picture and ensample of the Church’s authority.

Thirdly, there is the analogy presented by the transmission of natural life(105) through the one flesh of Adam to all his race. As the breath of natural life, once given to Adam, is continued on to all those sprung from his body, the power of the Creator never starting anew, but working in and through the trunk of human nature; so the supernatural life springing from our Lord, as the gift of His Incarnation, is breathed on the day of Pentecost into the whole Body of the Church to be communicated from that Body for ever. Christ is to the one exactly what Adam is to the other. As the Word of God, creating, joined to the inheritance of the flesh of Adam from generation to generation the communication of a spirit such as Adam’s, by which double action we have the unity of race, so the Word of God, redeeming, when He had taken our flesh as the first-fruits of human nature, breathed forth from that flesh the communication of His Spirit to the Body of the Church, by which we belong to the race of the Incarnate God, and are become His family, and make His house. Thus that which the body of Adam is naturally, the Body of Christ is spiritually, and the descent of human nature in its unity a picture of the Holy Spirit’s unity working through the Body which He has chosen. And this analogy is made the more striking by the statement so often repeated in the Greek Fathers, that with the natural life, as first given to Adam, was conjoined the gift of the Holy Ghost, forfeited afterwards by his sin, and withdrawn from him and his race, and now restored as the special gift of the Incarnate God.(106) Thus the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost is a true and real counterpart of the creation of man in Eden; but they who share it are become kindred of God through His flesh, and by so sharing it together, they form that society which failed through Adam’s sin. In the first creation, the Omnipotent Creator, in His bounty towards His favourite child, as foreseeing the assumption of that nature by Himself, attached to the gift of natural life the Spirit of sanctification; in the second, having assumed that nature, He gave through His own Body, first taken out of us, then crucified, now risen and exalted, the gift of the Spirit, Who, with all the endowments springing from Him, as the Inspirer of truth and charity, of unity and holiness, dwells in that Body for ever.

Thus in the union of the soul and body, in the constitution and authority of the human commonwealth, and in the race’s natural unity, God holds before us three analogies, which each in some respect, and altogether very largely, illustrate His finished work, to which all natural productions of His providence are subordinate, His work of predilection, His work of unbounded love and sovereign magnificence, the creation of that which is at once the Body, the Kingdom, and the Family of the Incarnate Word.

From all that has gone before we gather this conclusion, that to become a Christian was to enter into a spiritual and physical(107) unity with Christ by incorporation into that Body which He had created as the result of His becoming man. This it was for the individual to become a Christian. But Christianity itself was neither a mere system of belief, nor an outward order representing that belief; but “the great and glorious Body of Christ,”(108) possessing and exhibiting the whole truth of doctrine, possessing and distributing all the means of grace, and presenting together to God those whom it had reconciled with Him, and made one, as the members of the Son by the indwelling of the Spirit.

Let us now trace the exact correspondence of the historical fact with the dogmatic statement just given.

The Acts of the Apostles exhibit to us the creation of the divine society by the descent of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost. When they were all together, the sound as of a rushing mighty wind was heard, which filled the whole house wherein they were sitting, and tongues as of fire were seen, the tongues apportioned severally, but the fire one,(109) which rested upon each, to kindle in all that eternal flame of charity which was to draw into one the hearts of men, the fire of which our Lord had spoken as being that which He was come to light upon the earth. Fire, whose inward nature it is at once to illuminate and warm, to purify and unite, was thus appropriately selected as the outward sign, both expressing and conveying the fourfold office of the Comforter, who came to be “no longer an occasional visitant, but a perpetual Consoler and eternal Inhabitant”(110) of this His chosen home. As each in that assembly spoke in the one tongue of the country, he was heard by those present in the several tongues of all the nations of the earth represented at that great feast by the Jews who dwelt in them. And this was the mark, says S. Augustine,(111) of the Church which was to be through all nations, and that no one should receive the Holy Spirit, save he who should be jointed into the framework of its unity; the mark which signified that the confusion of Babel, dividing the race into nationalities jealous of each other and perpetual enemies, was to be reversed and overcome by the one Power whose force to unite should be greater than the force of sin to sever; who should gather out of all nations the City of God, fed by the exulting and abounding river of His Spirit, the fountain proper and peculiar to the Church of Christ: the mark of that one truth,(112) which conveys and harmonises and works out into all its details the whole revelation of God, and so is the utterance of one voice, the voice of Christ; speaking to all nations, not in the broken languages of their division, but in the Unity of His Person, carried by His Body. We have then in the one Fire the one inward power; in the one language its outward expression, in the assembly its receptacle, the House of God. This Body appears at once as formed and complete. In it sits and prays in her silent tenderness and unapproachable grandeur, as the Mother of the risen Lord and Head, and the Mother too of His race, the most beloved, the most lovable, and the most loving of creatures,(113) whose great function in the Church for ever is to pray for the members of her Son, and to solicit the graces of His Spirit, which as the Mother of the sacred race she gains and distributes to all and each that belong to it, a Second Eve who corresponds to the Second Adam, as the First Eve in the divine plan corresponded to the First Adam. In it the Apostles, so long before chosen and designated by their Lord, and having already received from Him portions of their supernatural power on the day of His resurrection and during the forty days of His secret instruction, teach and govern; in it Peter at their head exercises that primacy, which, imaged out by a new name imposed at his first calling, promised at his great confession, and confirmed and conveyed on the sea-shore of the lake of Galilee, is exhibited with such grandeur, as he stood with the eleven and lifted up his voice, to describe to the men of Judea and the inhabitants of Jerusalem the nature of the event which they were witnessing, and the fulfilment of all the promises made through their prophets concerning that presence of God in the pouring out of His Spirit among men in the last days. That first discourse of his at the head of his brethren is the summary as it were of his perpetual office of teaching and promulgating the dispensation of the Christ in the midst of the Church. Its immediate effect was the aggregation of three thousand persons to the Body, who were told that this was the way in which they should receive remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost.(114) The subsequent teaching of Peter and the Apostles, accompanied with miraculous cures, produced further aggregations among all ranks of the people. And the mode of salvation for all time is pointedly marked out by the words, “the Lord was adding to the Church day by day such as should be saved.”

We have only to repeat the process which is thus described as having taken place at Jerusalem in the first months after the day of Pentecost, by carrying it through the various cities of the Roman empire, Damascus, Antioch, Rome, Alexandria, and between these all round the shores of the Mediterranean, to have a just picture of the mode in which the Divine Society grew and gathered into itself more and more of those who listened to the truth which it announced. What is important to dwell upon is that men uniformly became Christians in one way, by being received into the Divine Body, through which reception forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost were conveyed to them. From the whole account contained in the sacred Scriptures, and from all that remains to us of history, the great fact is established for us that Christianity came into the world at its first beginning a society created by the Holy Ghost, and held together and informed by Him as its soul, who is sent down upon it as the Promise of the Father from the Incarnate Son.

Further, it was in and by their reception into this society that men received all the fruits of the Incarnation; it was in it that all the gifts of the Holy Ghost dwelt, and through it that they were dispensed. By hearing the truth announced by its ministry penitence was engendered in the listeners, itself a preventing grace of the Holy Ghost, which gave inward effect to the outward word. As a working of this penitence they came, according to the instruction of the teachers, to be baptised. By and in the act of baptism they were received into the divine society, and made partakers of the full operation of the Spirit who dwelt in it. They had the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity infused into them, each according to the measure of the grace accorded to him, and to help the exercise of these virtues, that they might be borne as it were with the wings of a Spirit, the seven-fold gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear, were added to the soul. None of these virtues and gifts were possessed by believers as individuals; all of them came to men as members of her who was dowered with the blood of Christ,(115) and whose bridal quality imparted to her children all which that blood had purchased. In her was stored up that great, inexhaustible source of abiding life, the Body and Blood of her Lord and Husband: in her the redeeming Word gave direct from His heart the vivifying stream. In her was the gift of teaching which illumined the understanding, and not only drew from without, as we have seen, those who should be saved from the ignorance of the pagan or the carnalism of the Jew, but which erected in the world the Chair of Truth,(116) that is, the rule and standard of right belief, which was the continuance of the pentecostal gift, the illuminating and kindling fire, and the speaking tongue of unity, which the Body of Christ possesses for ever. It was by enjoying these endowments together in her bosom, by the actions of a life pervaded with these principles, by the joint possession and exercise of these supernatural powers which at once opened to the intellect a new field of knowledge and strengthened the will to acts above its inborn force, that men were Christians. And those who remembered what they had been as Jews, and what they had been as heathens, had no difficulty in recognising such a life as the effect of a divine grace, and no temptation to refer it to anything which belonged to them as individuals, since its commencement coincided with their entrance into a divine society, its growth depended on their membership in that Body. Their union with Christ in this Body was something direct and palpable; to them the several degrees of that one ministry constituted by Christ were the joints and articulations of the structure; the teaching thence proceeding as it were the current of life; by their being parts of the structure they were saved from the confusion of errors which swept freely round them without, through the craft of men and the seduction of deceit.(117) “Possessing the truth in charity,” or “sanctified in the truth,” was the expression of that divine life in common whereby they were to grow up into one, and be called by the name of their Lord,(118) because inseparably united to Him by the nerves and ligaments of one Body.

And this makes manifest to us how Christians, while scattered through every city of the great Roman empire, formed one Body. It was by virtue of the unity of spiritual jurisdiction which directed the whole ministry of that Body. The command of our Lord was, “Go, and make disciples all nations,” “proclaim the gospel to every creature;” the Body assembled and empowered at Pentecost was to carry out this command. How did it do so? The teaching and ruling power was distributed through a ministry wherein those of a particular order were equal as holding that order: bishops as bishops were equal, priests as priests. But not the less by the distribution of the places where the ministry was to be fulfilled, subordination was maintained through the whole Body. Had it been otherwise, as each Bishop had the completeness of the priesthood in himself, his sphere of action, that is, his diocese, would have constituted a distinct body. But no such thing was ever imagined in the Church of those first centuries. The Bishops were, on the contrary, joint possessors of one power, only to be exercised in unity.(119) The unity was provided for in the Apostolic body by the creation of the Primacy, without which the Body never acted, the Primate being designated before the Body was made; the Primate invested with his functions on the sea-shore of the lake of Galilee before the Ascension, the Body on which he was to exercise them animated on the day of Pentecost. Spiritual jurisdiction being nothing else but the grant to exercise all spiritual powers, two jurisdictions would make two bodies; a thousand would make a thousand; so that the more the Church grew, the more it would be divided, were it not that the root of all its powers in their exercise is one. A spiritual kingdom is absolutely impossible without this unity of jurisdiction; and in virtue of it the whole Church, from north to south and from east to west, was and is one Body in its teaching and its rule; that is, in the administration of all those gifts which were bestowed at the day of Pentecost, and which have never ceased to be exercised from that day to this, and which shall never cease to the end of the world. Thus as it is through the Body that men are made and kept Christians, so the Primacy is that principle of cohesion and subordination without which the Body cannot exist.

Let us carry on the history of the divine Body to another point. How was the Truth transmitted in it?

Peter and his brethren having received through the great forty days from our Lord the complement of His teaching concerning His kingdom, were empowered by the descent of the Holy Ghost to commence its propagation. And for this work they use the same instrument which their Lord had used—the living spoken word. They labour together for some time; after several years they divide the world between them; but in both these periods they found communities and supply them with everything needful for complete organisation and future increase and progress by their spoken teaching, which therefore contained the whole deposit of the truth. The gospel of which S. Paul so repeatedly speaks was that which he communicated by word of mouth, and S. Peter and all the rest did the same. Communities were planted by Apostolic zeal over a great part of the Roman empire before as yet anything was written by their founders. The whole administration of the sacraments, and the order and matter of the divine service, were arranged by this personal teaching of the living word. All that concerned the Person of our Lord, all that He had taught, done, and suffered, was so communicated. One reason of this is plain. It was not the bare gospel, but the “gospel of the kingdom,”(120) which was to be proclaimed to all nations. It was not a naked intellectual truth of which they were the bearers, but a kingdom which they were to build. They were not disseminating a sect of philosophy, but founding an empire. They were a King’s heralds, and every king has a realm. Thus the Kingdom of the Word was proclaimed by the word spoken through many voices, but as the outpouring of one Spirit given on the day of Pentecost. This whole body of their teaching, therefore, was one Tradition; that is, a delivery over of the truth to them by inspiration of the Spirit, as the Truth who had become incarnate taught it, and a delivery of this truth from them to the communities which they set up. The first communication of the Christian faith to the individual was never made by writing. How, said the Apostle, should they invoke one whom they did not believe, but how believe in one of whom they had not heard, and how hear without a preacher, and how preach except they were sent?(121) It did not occur to him to ask how should they believe in one of whom they had not read. On the contrary, he gives in these few words the whole order of the truth’s transmission. He conceived not heralds without a commission, any more than faith without trust in the word of the heralds. But here is the great sending, at and from the day of Pentecost, the root of perpetual mission from which the heralds derive their commission; they are sent, they proclaim, they are heard, they are believed, and this faith opens the door for the admission of subjects into the kingdom, according to the law which they proclaim. Thus are described to us at some length the acts of that wise master-builder whose words we have just cited; but though he laboured more abundantly than all, all acted after the same manner. The Church was founded by personal teaching, of which the living word was the instrument, and the whole truth which was thus communicated was termed the Tradition(122) or Delivery.

We now come to the second step. Before the Apostles were taken to their reward, the same Spirit, who had instructed them that they were to found the spiritual kingdom by means of the living word, inspired them to commit to writing a portion of that great tradition which they had already taught by mouth.(123) But they never delivered these writings to men not already Christians. One evangelist expressly says that he drew up a narrative in order that his disciple might know the certainty of what he had already been instructed in catechetically, that is, that by that great system of oral teaching by question and answer, that grounding of the truth in the memory, intellect, and will, which Christianity had inaugurated, and that he wrote after the pattern of those who had delivered over the word to us, having been its original eyewitnesses and servants.(124) A second evangelist declares that what he was putting into writing was a very small portion indeed of what his Lord had done.(125) Another very remarkable thing is that the Apostles are not recorded to have put together what they had written themselves, or others by their direction, so as to make it one whole; far less that they ever declared what was so written to contain the complete tradition of what they had received. But what they did was to leave these writings in the hands of particular churches, having in every case addressed them to those who were already instructed as Christians, and not having left among them any document whatever intended to impart the Christian faith to those who were ignorant of it. These writings were in the strictest sense Scriptures of the Church, which sometimes stated, and always in their form and construction showed that they were adapted to those who had been taught the Christian faith by word of mouth. Moreover, it was left to the Church to gather them together, and make them into one book, which thenceforward should be _the Book_; it was left to the Church to determine which were to be received as inspired writings, and in accordance with the teaching already diffused in her, and which were not. And this collection of the several writings from the particular Churches to which they were addressed into one mass would seem not to have taken place until at least three or four generations after the whole order and institutions of the Church had been established by oral teaching, which filled as with a flood the whole Christian people. Then, finally, the authority of the Church alone established the canon of Scripture, and separated it off from all other writings.

Now as the planting of the Church by oral teaching was a direction of the Holy Spirit, from whom the whole work of mission proceeded, so all these particulars concerning the degree in which writing was to be employed, and the manner in which that writing was to be attested, and the persons to whom it was to be addressed, were a direction of the same Spirit. That a spiritual kingdom could not have been established save by oral teaching Christians may infer with certainty, because, in fact, that method was pursued. That a portion of the great Tradition should be committed to writing they may for the same reason infer to have been necessary for the maintenance of the truth, because it was so done. That these writings were the property of the Church—her Scriptures—may be inferred with no less truth, because they were addressed only to her children, and presupposed a system of instruction already received by those who were to read them. And, finally, that they were to be understood in their right sense only by the aid of the Spirit who dictated them, is, their being given in this manner once admitted, an inference of just reasoning. It is plain, when once these things are stated, that these writings were not intended to stand alone, as ordinary books, and to be understood by themselves. Not only were they part of a great body of teaching, but a portion of a great institution, to which they incessantly alluded and bore witness. They would speak very differently to those without and to those within the kingdom of which they were documents. They would remind the instructed at every turn of doctrines which they had been taught, corroborating these and themselves explained by them. Some of them indeed were letters, and we all know how different is the meaning of letters to those who know the writer and his allusions, and to those who do not. A word of reference in these documents to a great practice of Christian life would kindle into a flame the affection of those who possessed that practice, while it would pass as a dead letter to those who had it not.(126) Such word, therefore, would be absolute proof of the practice to the former, while it would seem vague and indeterminate and no proof at all to the latter.

From what has been said we may determine the relation of the Church to the Scriptures. She having been planted everywhere by the personal oral teaching of the apostles and their disciples, being in full possession of her worship and her sacraments, filled by that word which they had spoken to her, and ruled by that Spirit in whom they had spoken, accepted these writings which they left as conformable to that teaching which they had delivered by word of mouth, esteemed them, moreover, as sacred, because proceeding from the dictation of the one Spirit, and finally put them together and severed them off from all other books, as forming, in conjunction with that unwritten word in possession of which she passed this judgment upon them, her own canon or rule of faith. Thenceforth they were to be for all ages a necessary portion of the divine Tradition which was her inheritance from the Incarnate Word, distributed by His Spirit. They were to be in her and of her. To her belonged, first, the understanding of them; secondly, the interpreting them to her children, out of the fund of that whole Tradition lodged in her, and by virtue of that indwelling Spirit, who, as He had created, maintained her; as part and parcel, moreover, of that whole kingdom, of that body of worship and sacraments, which she is.

And this brings us to a further point of the utmost importance. For the Truth, which is the subject matter of all this divine Tradition or Delivery from the Incarnate Word, in order to be efficacious and permanent, approached men in the shape of a society invested with grace.(127) It was not proposed as a theory which is presented simply to the reason, and accepted or rejected by it. True, it was addressed to the reason, but only when illuminated by faith could the reason accept it. Here, again, it showed itself manifestly as “the gospel _of the kingdom_.” It was the good tidings proclaimed, not simply and nakedly to man’s intellect, but as the gift and at the same time the law of that kingdom which accompanied its publication by the bestowal of power to accept it, and to make it the rule of conduct. There were many whom the word, though proclaimed to them as to others, did not help, because it was not mixed with faith in those who heard it. S. Paul preached to many when the heart of one Lydia was opened to receive what he announced.(128) Thus with the first hearing of the message coincided the beginning of grace to accept it. But so likewise the Church supplied a storehouse of grace for the continuance of the truth in those who had once received it. Truth and grace, as they come together in her, so they remain together inseparable. Wisdom, understanding, counsel, and knowledge, which perfect the intellect, are linked in her with fortitude, piety, and fear, which perfect the will. And this which is true of the individual is true of the mass. In the Body, as well as in each single member of it, and the more because the Body is an incomparably grander creation, it is the sanctified intellect which must receive, harmonise, and develope the truth. If the sevenfold fountain of the Spirit’s gifts is one in the individual, much more is it one in that Body out of whose plenitude the individual receives. Thus wherever the Apostles preached the word, if faith made it fruitful, they bestowed the sacraments.

We shall see, if we observe it closely, that it is a triple cord through which the Holy Spirit conveys His life perpetually to the Body; and in His life is the Truth.

First, there is the succession of men. As the Word Incarnate taught, so men bear on His teaching. Personal labours, intercourse from mouth to mouth, the action of men on men, the suffering of men for men, this was from the beginning, this is to be for ever, the mode of spreading His kingdom. It is not a paper kingdom, it cannot be printed off and disseminated by the post. But from His own Person it passed to Peter and the Apostles, and from them to a perpetual succession of men, whose special work it is to continue on this line by a chain never to be broken. These are the messengers, or heralds, or stewards, or ministers, or teachers, or shepherds. They are all and each of these according to the manifoldness of the gift which they carry. Through the unbrokenness of this line the continuity of the gift is secured. Through it the Redeemer, King, and Head touches, as it were, each point of time and space, and with a personal ministry lays hold of each individual through the vast extent of His kingdom in time and space. And the gift is as living and as near to Him now as it was when S. Paul spoke of it as communicated by the imposition of his hands to his disciple; nay, as it was when He himself breathed on His Apostles together assembled, and said, “Receive the Holy Ghost;” and will be equally living and direct from Him to the last who shall receive it to the end of time. And all this because these men who are taken up into this succession are the nerves of His mystical Body, through which runs the supply to all the members. This is the indestructible framework which He has wrought for carrying on to men His own teaching, until the whole mass grow up to that fulness of the perfect stature which He has foreseen and determined.

The second succession is that of the Truth itself committed to these men. For that plenitude of teaching which the Apostles delivered orally to the Church has never ceased to rest in her, and out of it she dispenses to all the ages her divine message. But part of this teaching by the further ordering of the Spirit of Truth has been incorporated in writing. And no one can doubt that this incorporation has given a firmness and stability to the teaching which we do not see how it could otherwise have possessed. Thus the great Tradition of the Truth poured out upon the Church has been partly written and partly unwritten; not as if there were two teachings separable from each other, but one and the same which runs in a perpetual blending. Through the written teaching we receive the very words consecrated by our Lord’s use: we have the priceless privilege of knowing how he spoke; of catching the accents of His voice, and the look of His eyes, and the gestures of His body, portrayed in that narrative. The words of Him who spake as never man spake live and sound for ever in our ears; and we recognise in the structure of His sentences, which convey in a clause principles of endless application, forces on which a universe can be built, the Father’s Word, and the world’s Creator, and the Church’s Head. Parable and apophthegm and answer, metaphor and plain speech, when used by Him, are all impregnated with this power. And now that we possess this peculiar language of the Word Incarnate, embodied and fixed for ever to our senses as well as our affections, it seems as if we could not have done without it. Then the mode in which His own Apostles apply and illustrate His doctrines, and exhibit to us the formation of the society which He came to institute, possesses a value only subordinate to His own words. The written word, it has been said,(129) gives to the whole Church through all times a sense of the truth and consistency of her teaching like that which the sense of personal identity gives to the individual respecting his own being. And again, what memory is to the single man, such is the whole tradition of the Truth in the bosom of the Church. But it is through the unwritten teaching deposited in her by the Apostles that she possesses the key to the true understanding of that which is written. The one in her practice has never been severed from the other. So dear has the written word been to her that almost the blackest epithet in language, “traitor,” is derived from the name which she gave to those who, under fear of persecution, surrendered to the heathen her sacred books. With these in her hand, or rather in her heart, she has directed and carried out that great system of instruction which the Apostles laid down and established by their acts. For to her what they did was as sacred as what they said, or what they wrote; and numberless acts of theirs constituted her teaching originally, and have prolonged and continued it on since.

For, besides the succession of men and the succession of doctrine, there is in her likewise the succession of institutions. As chief of these, but involving a number of subordinate rites, the Apostles with their first oral teaching delivered likewise to the Church sacraments, instituted, not by them, but by their Lord Himself, which at once embodied the truth taught by them, and conveyed the grace by which that truth was to find a home in men’s heart and mind. No sooner was the first teaching of Peter at the head of the Apostles uttered, and the gift of forgiveness of sins and of adoption disclosed, than three thousand persons received the double gift by the baptism which followed. Thus they established in the Church seven great rites, encompassing the whole of human life. The regenerating power which was the beginning of the whole change that they sought to work in man was stored up in one; the confirming and developing it in a second; the feeding and increasing it in a third; the removal of obstacles to it in a fourth; the supporting and restoring the human nature so elevated, when under pressure of sickness and in fear of death, in a fifth; the blessing and consecrating the union of the species in a sixth; and, finally, the conferring that distinctive power which transmitted through all ages her Lord’s gift to the Church in a seventh. This is that great and marvellous sacramental system by which the Church, dowered, as we have said, in her quality of Bride with her Lord’s blood, applies that blood to His members, according to their needs. This is the perpetual consecration of matter to a supernatural end, of which the highest example is found in the Body of the Head Himself, and so it is an enfolding of human nature with the Incarnation, and a transforming it into the image of its Head. But such, likewise, is the summary of the whole written and unwritten teaching of the Church; such also, in few and brief words, the perpetual work of the succession of men whom we have described.

Thus the three successions, of men, of doctrines, and of institutions, are woven by the Holy Spirit together as three strands of a rope which cannot be broken: in the union of these three His perpetual presence dwells; and this is the spinal cord whereby He joins the Body with the Head.

Let us take instances wherein the force of this union is seen.

The first gift He bestowed upon men when the gospel of the kingdom approached them was the forgiveness of sins. This is a power belonging to God alone, as sin is an offence against His majesty. The conferring of this power upon the Apostles by our Lord Himself is explicitly recorded. But then two sacraments exhibit the application of this power, first that of baptism, where it is given plenarily; secondly that of penance, where it is given under restriction. And further, an order of men is instituted for this perpetual application. Here, then, we see the force of the triple cord carrying on through all ages this great truth of the forgiveness of sins in and by the Church of God. The very definite mention of the grant of this power in the written tradition is not left exposed by itself to the action of unbelieving reason. It has a double bulwark in the two institutions which assert its perpetual exercise as a matter of history, and in the order of men established to carry it out.

Take again the doctrine of the Real Presence, upon which infidelity falls as being a proof charge of human credulity,(130) on which faith and love rest as the sovereign gift of God. The recorded words of our Lord Himself express it distinctly and emphatically; further words of His in the sixth chapter of S. John allude to it with equal force, and S. Paul repeatedly refers to it. But this is not enough for the solicitude with which the Holy Spirit has guarded it against all attack. As the great central rite of Christian worship it is presented day after day, in myriads of churches, from age to age, to the eyes and hearts of men. The act in which Christians assemble, in which they offer up at once their repentance and their requests, their thanksgivings and their praises, to Him who has formed them into one Body, lives upon this truth. And further, the order of men which is the backbone of the Church, the great Christian priesthood, made by our Lord in instituting the rite and conferring the gift, exists for its continuance. Against such a truth, defended with such bulwarks, both infidelity and heresy dash themselves with impotent rage in vain.

Thirdly, we have in the epistles of S. Paul a mention of the bishop’s office and the duties belonging to it. The mention is incidental, and the words not so determinate as in the former instances given. Those who are outside the Body, in their attack upon the necessity of episcopacy, thought that they could cut through these words so as to make it doubtful whether the office of bishop, as distinguished from that of priest, was of original institution. But then history disclosed the fact that when the last apostle was taken from the earth not a church existed which was not under episcopal jurisdiction, and through the whole world, by the institution of bishops, was fulfilled the prediction,—Instead of thy fathers thou shalt have children, whom thou mayest make princes in all lands. Thus, while the written record was interpreted, the unwritten teaching of the Church found a plain and unanswerable proof in her invariable practice. All through her long history she is seen to be governed by bishops; and the words of S. Paul, flanked by the institution and the practice, are more than sufficient to maintain the truth.

Once more let us take the primacy of S. Peter’s see in the Church. This, as is well known, rests in the written word mainly on three great passages of S. Matthew, S. Luke, and S. John. These, indeed, are so specific and definite that they convey the dignity intended as clearly as the passages above referred to convey the forgiveness of sins or the Real Presence. But over and above these, what an overwhelming proof in the unbroken succession of those who exercised the primacy from the beginning, and are referred to from age to age by the doctors, fathers, and historians of the Church. Beside the charter of institution stands the long record of the work wrought in virtue of it, the witness of the Church to it in councils, the obedience to it in fact. As the priesthood exists in attestation of the Real Presence, so the primacy stands beside our Lord’s words, first promising and then conferring it, like the comment of eighteen hundred years, uniform and consistent.

What we have here applied in the case of the forgiveness of sins, the Real Presence, episcopacy, and the primacy of the Church, might be carried out in the case of many more doctrines forming a part of the great deposit. But it may be well to cite one instance of a truth not contained in the written word at all, which through the unwritten teaching of the Church has passed into universal practice. This is not the abolition only of the Jewish Sabbath, constituted as it was by the most express divine command, for to that abolition there is a passing reference in an epistle of S. Paul, but the further substitution of the day of the resurrection, the first day of the week for the seventh, with a modified observance. This rests solely upon the deposit of the Church’s unwritten teaching, corroborated by universal practice from the apostolic times.

Viewing, then, the transmission of the Truth as a whole, and the creation of the mystical Body of Christ as its home, and the Holy Spirit as the perpetual Indweller who fills that treasure-house of Truth and Grace, we may consider its maintenance as secured by the triple succession or tradition of men, of doctrine, and of institutions which are inseparably joined together in that its home. But there are some words of our Lord so distinctly and translucently expressing all this statement respecting the mode in which His Truth was first and is ever to be transmitted, and the conditions to which His perpetual presence is attached, that we cannot forbear to adduce them.

His parting instructions to His Apostles on the Mountain of Galilee given by S. Matthew run thus: “Jesus approached them and said unto them, All power has been given unto Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore, and make disciples all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and behold I am with you all days even to the end of the world.” We shall here note six things. First, there is the root and foundation of all mission, the power bestowed upon Christ as man, in virtue of the Incarnation: “all power has been given to Me in heaven and on earth;” secondly, there is the derivation of this power from Christ to His Apostles, in virtue of which sent by Him, as He by His Father, they were to go forth: “Go ye therefore;” thirdly, there is the creation of the perpetual teaching power, the authority by which truth was to be imparted: “make disciples all nations.” He placed it in them as in one Body, here fulfilling what S. Augustine afterwards expressed, that He “seated the doctrine of Verity in the Chair of Unity.” They, invested with one Spirit, His own Spirit of Truth, should go forth and make disciples all nations to one Body of Truth. It is the creation of a power new as the Incarnation, as it unique, because springing from it, founded and continued in it. He Himself is the one Teacher whose voice they express: He who came on earth for three and thirty years speaks for evermore in those whom He sends as one Body, which calls no man teacher, because it is the Body of Christ, _the_ Teacher: so that this function of magisterial teaching is the great distinctive office of His Church, coming from above, and invested with the authority of the God-man, by which it draws to it disciples, whose consent is not the ground but the result of its authority. Fourthly, there is the creation of the sacraments, as containing the grace which is needed for the reception of this Truth, and they are summed up in the first, which is the beginning of the new life, illumination, and perfection, and which is given in the covenant name of God, as the Christian God, and is the mark of the triune Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, impressed on his own people of acquisition. Thus Grace is for ever associated with Truth as the means whereby alone on earth Truth shall prevail and be received, and that only as the teaching of that Body whose Head is full of Grace and Truth. Fifthly, there is marked the manner of the teaching, the nature of the magisterial office created as that of a living body of men: “teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” The fund from which this teaching is drawn is that whole communication of truth from the Incarnate Word Himself, given to them by word of mouth, of which we have spoken above as the great Tradition or Delivery; and out of which a part is incorporated in the written word, while the whole dwells ever in the Body created to receive it, from which it is to be imparted by perpetual oral teaching. The teaching, therefore, rests upon the perpetual presence of the Body representing Christ, and as in the days of His flesh He teaches through it, and has fixed part of His tradition in it by writing, not to the exclusion of the rest, but as the charter of a sovereign, the title-deeds of an empire, to be perpetually applied, interpreted, and developed in that whole system of institutions, by that whole race of teachers, in the life of that one Body, which He was creating. And lastly, to this perpetual living line of teachers, to this perpetual living doctrine, to this perpetual living framework of grace, He has promised His own presence without fail to the end. In this triple succession He is seen, lives, and rules, and this is His Kingdom, His Temple, His Body, His Bride, His Family, to whom He says, Behold, I am with you all days, even to the end of the world.

From these words of our Lord, as from the whole previous argument, we gather that while the Truth which Christ imparted to His Apostles was one and complete, its development in its various relations was designedly left as the proper work of such a Body as He created. He Himself spoke as God in human flesh, uttering, that is, creative words, which gathered up in a sentence a germ of truth capable of a long series of applications, and requiring them in order to be understood. And the aptitude to make these applications, so that the truth proclaimed by Him and committed to His Apostles should penetrate through and leaven the whole human society, He gave to His mystical Body. Let us take an instance of this. The Pharisees approached Him one day to entangle Him by their words, and proposed to Him a dilemma from which they thought that He could not escape save by ruining His influence with one great party, or by encountering the danger of being charged with seditious teaching by another. They put to Him the question whether it was lawful to give tribute to Cæsar or not. Whereupon He asked them to show Him the tribute-money, and pointing to the image of the emperor upon it, uttered those famous words, “Render therefore to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s, and to God the things which are God’s.” Now these words were laid up in the treasury of His Church, and by them she has had to determine the relation between the civil and the spiritual powers in the society created by Him who spake them. Here is a vast development from a small seed: but it is a seed cast by the world’s Creator and the Body’s Head. And His teaching is full of such seeds, as the history of His Church is one great process of developing and harmonising and conveying to man the truth thus cast into the fallows of her soil. It is not new truth, for He gave the germ, and no power in man could have developed it without the germ, any more than it could produce the oak without the acorn. It is the same truth, as He taught it, but with that process passed upon it which He intended when He gave it in such a form, and when He made a living Body, to be called by His name, to propagate His teaching, to collect His members into one, and to fill the earth with the knowledge which He brought.

Such a work, therefore, the root and authorisation of which we have been attempting to delineate in this chapter, stretches over the whole field which Truth and Grace occupy, and over all the relations of men which are summed up in what they are to believe and what they are to do. These ramifications are all but endless. But to all these extends that giving of the Holy Ghost in His fourfold character of the Spirit of Unity, Verity, Charity, and Sanctity, which is the result of the Incarnation, and which makes the Church. What we have said here has a special relation to Truth, and to Christian morals as resting upon Christian dogma. But it is impossible to separate Truth from Grace, in their actual operation as powers: faith and charity in the Christian are linked together, as the intellect and the will are one soul. What we have said is but an introduction to a sketch of the great evolution of dogmatic truth through eighteen centuries: but in recording its rise, the secret of its growth, and the source of its strength, it was impossible not to bring out the great fact that Christianity was nothing less than a divine life produced in the world over against the existing heathenism, and laying hold of the whole soul of man, in which, as we have just said, intellect and will are inseparable. It did not consist in anything which individuals believed, however true; but in a society of which Truth and Grace were the joint spring, and it was produced in the midst of a world which had to a great extent forfeited both Truth and Grace, while both returned to it as the gift of Christ assuming man’s nature. This error and distraction of heathenism, and this great unity of Christian life grounded in faith and charity which rose up against it, were profoundly felt by all the Fathers, being eye-witnesses of the old world and the new. Their writings express it again and again, with the vividness which only eye-witnesses, who are likewise actors and sufferers, feel. In nothing, perhaps, do they so differ from modern writers as in the energy with which they appreciate the supernatural character of the Christian, and the wonderful being and endowment of that Christian Body which impressed this character on its members. One cause, we may suppose, of this was the sight of heathenism before them with all its impurities and its impotence to produce good. So they were not even tempted to that naturalism which is the besetting sin of our age and these countries. It would have seemed to them not only an ingratitude but an absurdity to refer to the inborn force of humanity a change equally of the intellect and of the will which they saw to belong only to the power of Christ revealed in His Church. We will cite one such passage as a conclusion to this discussion, and because it represents the whole train of thought which we have been drawing out.(131)

“Of this sacrament, this sacrifice, this priest, this God, before, having been made of a woman, He entered on His mission, all sacred and mystical, angelic and miraculous appearances to our fathers, as well as their own deeds, were resemblances, in order that every creature might in a manner by its acts speak of that One destined to come, in whom should be the salvation of all that were to be restored from death. For as we had started away from the one true supreme God by the injustice of impiety, and fallen out of harmony with Him, and become unstable as water, and wasted ourselves on a multitude of vanities, rent in pieces, and hanging in tatters to every piece, need was there that by the will and command of a compassionating God this multitude of objects itself should utter a cry in unison, calling for One to come; and that thus called upon this One should come, and that the multitude should attest together that the One had come: and so we, discharged from the burden of this multitude, should come to One; and dead in our soul by many sins, and from our sin doomed to death in the flesh, should love that One, who, being without sin, died for us in the flesh: and believing on Him when risen, and with Him rising again in the Spirit through faith, should be justified, being in the One Just made one: and should not despair of rising again in our very flesh, beholding our Head being One going before His many members; in whom now, cleansed by faith, and hereafter restored by vision, and reconciled by the Mediator to God, we might inhere in the One, enjoy the One, and continue One for ever.

“Thus the Son of God, Himself at once the Word of God and Son of man, Mediator of God and men, equal to the Father by the unity of the godhead, and partaker of us through the assumption of the manhood, interceding with the Father for us through that which was man, yet not concealing that as God He was One with the Father, thus speaks: ‘Neither pray I for these alone, but for those also who shall believe through their word on Me; that all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be One in Us, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me. And the glory which Thou gavest Me, I have given them, that they may be One as we also are One.’ He said not, that I and they may be One thing, although in that He is the Head of the Church, and the Church His Body, He might say, I and they not One thing, but One person, because the Head and the Body is One Christ. But marking His Godhead as consubstantial with the Father (whence in another place He says, I and the Father are One thing), He wills that His own should be One thing in their own kind, that is, in the consubstantial parity of the same nature, but in Him, because in themselves they could not, as severed from each other by diversity of pleasures, desires, and impurities of sin. From these they are cleansed through the Mediator, so as to be One Thing in Him, not merely by the same nature in which all from mortal men become equal to the angels, but likewise by the same will breathing in perfect harmony together into the same beatitude, welded, as it were, by the fire of charity into One Spirit. For this is the force of His words, That they may be One, as We also are One: that as the Father and the Son are One not only in equality of substance, but also in will, so these also between whom and God the Son is Mediator, may be One Thing not merely by being of the same nature, but also by the same society of affection. And the very point that He is Mediator, by whom we are reconciled to God, He indicates in the words, ‘I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be consummated into One.’ Thus as through the mediator of death we had receded from our Creator, stained and alienated, so through the Mediator of life we might be purified and reconciled, wherein consist our true peace and stable union with Him.”