The Formation of Christendom, Volume II

This state of suffering continued during the life of Severus for nine years: and splendid examples of Christian championship were shown in all the churches.[265 - Euseb. Hist. vi. 1.] It is only with the accession of Caracalla that peace is restored, and then ensues a period of comparative repose: that is, while the ordinary law against the Christian Faith as an illicit religion still continues, it is understood that the emperor does not wish it to be put in action. In such intervals that Faith, strengthened by the conflicts it had undergone, and admired by those before whose eyes it had enabled its adherents to brave and endure every sort of suffering, sprung up and shot out with redoubled vigour, and the seed which the blood of the martyrs had shed abroad found time to grow.

The summary of the seventy-four years is this. From 161 to 180 there are nineteen years of irregular but severe persecution, followed by seventeen, from 180 to 197, wherein the denouncing of Christians is forbidden, though if brought to trial, they are punishable with death. Five years succeed, from 197 to 202, in which the favour of Severus seems lost, and the state of intermittent persecution takes effect. Then breaks out a general persecution, set on foot by the emperor himself, and we may judge if he who slaughtered his senate spared Christians. This lasts for nine years until his death in 211, whereon a time of peace returns, which is most complete during the reign of Alexander, but continues more or less from 211 to the end of his reign in 235.

On a review of the whole period it is evident that the Church has passed from its state of concealment into almost full light. The fiery trial which it met at the beginning of the third century from the hand of Severus is the best proof that can be given how greatly it had increased, how it could no longer be ignored or despised; how its organisation which was hidden from Trajan was at least partially revealed to Severus, and how he saw and attempted to meet the danger which the earlier emperor would have tried to stamp out, had he divined it. But it is evident also that in proportion as the Christian Faith had grown, the heathen empire had been shaken in its foundations. Its period of just government was over; its imperial power was to fall henceforth into the hands of adventurers, with whom it would be more and more the symbol of force alone, and not of law: henceforth they would seldom even in blood be Roman, and more seldom still in principles. Marcus was well nigh the last zealot for the Jupiter of the Capitol: within a generation after him Heliogabalus will think of a fusion of all religions in his god the sun, and Alexander Severus of a religious syncretism wherein Orpheus, Abraham, and Christ testify together to the divine unity.[266 - Champagny, les Antonins, iii. 326, 338.] Nor is this a fancy of the prince alone. All the thinking minds of his time have become ashamed of Olympus and its gods. The cross has wounded them to death. A new philosophy – the last fortress into which retreating heathenism throws itself – while it breaks up Roman life, prepares the way for the Christian Faith which it strenuously combats. The Emperor Severus, fixing the eye of a statesman and a soldier on that Faith, contemplates its grasp upon society, and decrees from the height of the throne a general assault upon it; while his wife encourages a writer[267 - Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written at the request of the empress Julia Domna. See Kellner, Hellenismus und Christenthum, c. v. s. 4, 81-4.] to draw an ideal heathen portrait as a counterpart to the character of Christ, tacitly subtracting from the gospels an imitation which is to supply the place of the reality. The time was not far distant when Origen would already discern and prophesy the complete triumph of the religion thus assailed; and if Celsus had objected, that were all to do as Christians did, the emperor would be deserted, and his power fall into the hands of the most savage and lawless barbarians, would reply: “If all did as I do, men would honour the emperor as a divine command, and the barbarians drawing nigh to the word of God would become most law-loving and most civilised; their worship would be dissolved, and that of the Christians alone prevail, as one day it will alone prevail, by means of that Word gathering to itself more and more souls.”[268 - Orig. c. Cels. viii. 68, tom. i. p. 793.]

But before such a goal be reached, many a martyr's crown has yet to be won, and more than barbarian lawlessness and cruelty have to be overcome.

Chapter XII. The Third Age Of The Martyr Church

“Rex pacificus magnificatus est, cujus vultum desiderat universa terra.”

The third century is that during which the Christian Church was making its way into every relation of life, and taking possession of human society. During this period it advances into full light, and becomes a manifest power. In the second century Celsus had attacked it as disclosed only to the yearning hearts of slaves, and fostered by the devotion of the weaker sex. At the distance of three generations Origen answered him, but the religion which he defended already stood avowed alike before the inquiring gaze of philosophers, the corrupt crowds of cities, and the jealous fear of rulers. Even in Rome, the sceptered head of idolatry, whose nobles the great political traditions of their city, and whose populace their sensual life, having its root in a false worship, made the most difficult to convert, the hated faith is known to have had public churches by the time of Alexander Severus, two hundred years after its first rise.[269 - Churches in private houses, under cover of that great liberty which invested with a sort of sacred independence the Roman household, it had from the beginning: the church of S. Pudentiana in the house of the senator Pudens still guards the altar on which S. Peter offered.] And much more everywhere else it had planted its foot openly on the soil of the empire. It is time, then, to view the Church as an institution offering the strongest contrast to the empire itself, to the barbarism which surrounded the empire, and to the sectarianism which was everywhere aspiring to counter-work and supplant that entire body of truth on some portion of which nevertheless it was all the time feeding.

1. And first the empire during this century presents itself to us in a most unwonted aspect.

Septimius Severus having destroyed the rivals who competed with him for what was now become the great object of a successful general's ambition, based his power avowedly on the sword. The secret of empire which he transmitted to his children was to foster and indulge the army, and to disregard all else. The senate, the representative of legal power, he despised and decimated. He died in 211, not before his eldest son had already lifted his hand against him, and the four princes of his house all perished by the sword, one by the hand of a brother, the other three by revolted soldiers. In the seventy-three years which elapse from his death to the accession of Diocletian twenty-five emperors are acknowledged at Rome, of whom twenty-three come to an end by violent deaths, almost always by insurrections of soldiers, under instigation of ambitious officers. Besides these, eight associates of the empire, and nineteen generals who during the reign of Gallienus assume the purple in various provinces, are all slain. During eighty-two years Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus, all at a mature time of life, adopted by the actual ruler to succeed, had governed a stable empire: but now it passes within a shorter period of time, the term of a single human life, nay a term in one case embraced by a single reign,[270 - The reign of Louis XIV.] into twenty-five different hands. And indeed it seemed after the capture of the Emperor Valerian by the Persians, as if that great confederacy, which had just celebrated the thousandth anniversary of the imperial city's foundation, was about to break up and be resolved into its component parts. At one moment two great princesses, Victoria and Zenobia, worthy even by the avowal of Romans to wear the Roman diadem, were on the point of establishing the one an empire of the Gauls in the West, the other an empire of the East embracing just those countries which Antony had ruled with Cleopatra at his side. A succession of great generals, all from the province of Illyricum, at last saves the empire and reasserts its unity. But the forty-nine years following the murder of Alexander Severus are filled by the struggles of twenty sovereigns and nineteen pretenders to sovereignty, scarcely any of whom reign so much as five years. Many of them are rulers of great ability and remarkable energy. Claudius, Aurelian, Probus, and Carus, and perhaps Decius, required but happier circumstances to be emperors whose fame would have matched that of Trajan or Hadrian: but their short tenure of power, occupied with the vast effort to restore unity and beat back the barbarian, prevented their doing more than preserve the imperial power and the empire itself. This whole time, then, in civil society was one of fluctuation, anxiety, disaster, alarms from beyond the frontiers and anarchy within them. The Roman peace seemed departing, and the majesty of the empire irreparably violated. Men could not tell what the morrow would bring forth. The fairest cities of the Roman world, Alexandria and Antioch, narrowly escaped perishing through internal discord or hostile surprise. Greece and Asia Minor, after reposing for centuries under the safeguard of the Roman name, found themselves swept through and desolated by barbarian hordes. Italy itself was in imminent danger of the same lot. Towards the end of this period the senate by the election of Tacitus seems to make what may be termed its final effort to assert itself as the depository of legitimate power, the representative of civil society: and this time of confusion issues in a rejection of any such claim, and the establishment of unlimited despotism in the empire as reconstituted by Diocletian. To these straits, then, the first great and haughty enemy of the Christian Church was reduced, so that the power which a century before could look down with proud indifference on the sufferings of Christians now seemed to tremble for its own existence. And in such a condition of human society the great advance of the Church was carried on.

2. But beyond the empire to the north, advancing upon it like the multitudinous waves of the ocean on an exposed coast, lay the ever-battling legions of the northern tribes in their three great divisions of the Teutonic, Slavic, and Finnish races. If Roman society suffered throes of distress, its condition was peace compared with the instability which may be said to have been the very life of these tribes. Once at least in every century they gather themselves up for a concentrated effort against the empire whose rich civilisation lies stretched out before them as a continual prey. After the failure of Arminius to construct a German kingdom, and of Marobod to construct a Suevian, in the time of Augustus, Decebalus, in the time of Trajan, makes another effort in behalf of his Dacians. But here the great Roman general forces barbarism to retreat, and plants a fresh citadel in its very stronghold by establishing a province north of the Danube. Then there is comparative tranquillity for sixty years. It seems as if these two generations were offered by divine Providence to the empire yet in its unbroken strength as a time for its pacific conversion, which if it had accepted, the eruption of the northern nations might for ever have been kept back by the unity which religious conviction would have bestowed on civilisation, and the fresh and living force which it would have imparted to society not yet exhausted by despotic power. But with Marcus Aurelius the empire turns definitively away. A new religious revolution under Odin in Scandinavia had wakened up with redoubled force the destroying energy of barbarism. The Goths had migrated from Sweden to the Black Sea; all the tribes in the interval had been displaced and dashed upon each other by this removal. The war of the Marcomans occupied during eighteen years, from 162 to 180, the whole forces of the empire; Rome was obliged even to arm its slaves, and Italy feared an invasion more terrible than that of the Cimbri, which it cost Marcus Aurelius his life to avert.

Again, during the captivity of Valerian, another grand assault of the northern tribes takes place. The Franks attack western, the Alamans eastern Gaul; they pass the Alps and advance to Ravenna, while Alamans and Sarmatians throw themselves upon Pannonia, and the Goths seize upon Thrace and Greece. The emperors Claudius, Aurelian, and Probus are the saviours of Rome from this new flood. Of the last of these it is recorded that he dealt successively with Franks, Burgundians, Alamans, Vandals, the Bastarnæ, and the whole barbarian brood: and seventy cities raised from their ruins, and fortifications repaired upon a line of fifteen hundred miles, were the fruits of his victories.[271 - Am. Thierry, Tableau de l'Empire Romain, p. 412.]

So much for the north: while on the east the Persian empire, hereditary foe of the Roman name, had found a new and more vigorous master in the race of the Sassanidæ, who took the religion of Zoroaster to reanimate the national spirit. Ardeschir claimed once more the whole realm which Cyrus and Darius had ruled. Henceforth the Romans had a neighbour more than ever threatening their eastern frontier, and never to be wholly subdued, until the empire of Mohammed arose to detach a great part of their dominion, and to move with redoubled force upon what remained.

To the south of the Roman provinces in Africa were tribes at least as savage as those of the north. Thus the whole empire was enringed with enemies: on the east an opposing civilisation and religion; on the north and south barbarian tribes in perpetual confusion and conflict with each other. Such was the great realm of disorder which surged and heaved to the north and south of the empire; and such the second great enemy which in future times was to occupy the Christian Church, and at present offered the strongest contrast to that moral polity of peace and goodwill, of loyal submission, patient endurance, and heroic fortitude, which was spreading daily in the empire.

3. But there was yet another enemy within the empire itself, which from the beginning tracked the footsteps of the Church, grew with its increase, and everywhere attempted to dissolve its organisation and weaken its influence. The whole second century is occupied with the rise and tangled growth of the Gnostic sects. But these were not alone. From the very time of the Apostles we find the evidence of a number of sects, rising and falling, preying on and devouring each other, none without some portion of Christian truth, on which it feeds, blended with Jewish, Greek, Oriental, Egyptian, Libyan notions, prejudices, and errors; domiciled in various parts of the empire in accordance with the national or local character which they represent. They reproduce with a Christian colour the sects and the sect-life of the Greek schools of philosophy. As the wheat has its proper weed, which springs up in the midst of it and counterfeits it, so error, everywhere gathering round some portion of truth, forms itself into an antagonistic life. The force and truth of the Christian Church were shown not in the absence of these rivals, but in its triumph over their variety, in its remaining one whilst they diverged endlessly from that unchanging original type, in its continuous and uniform growth whilst they rose and fell, domineered in certain times and places, and then disappeared. In this its course the Church had to master very great difficulties, which were inherent in the manner of its rise. It had to remain one society in spite of the isolation and self-government of its local portions. It possessed in each place but a feeble minority of members compared with the mass of unbelievers. Against its assimilating power was ranged the force of national feelings which underlay the Roman authority throughout the whole empire. It had to deal entirely by moral means with the full liberty of error to which its adherents were exposed. Lastly, it had to do all this amid the continual strain of threatened or actual persecution, a state which at its best was one of insecurity, and which any local trouble, the ill-will of a mob, the greed or ambition or fear of provincial rulers, not to speak of the imperial state-policy, might turn into the pressure of severe suffering.

In the face of such difficulties, if the Christian Church continued one in its doctrine, organisation, and manner of life, such unity was assuredly the proof of a divine power residing it.

I shall now proceed to show by the testimony of eye-witnesses that such unity was its distinguishing characteristic.

Now there was not a race or a religion in all this Roman empire, endless as the races and religions comprehended in it were, out of which individuals were not drawn into the bosom of the one great Christian society; and yet within this there was a perfect union of all hearts and minds in the conviction that the multitude so collected was one people apart from all other peoples. And this conviction is itself the great marvel. How was it wrought? For it was an utterly new thing upon the earth. The union of race, language, and locality, with which sameness of religion was usually interwoven, had been hitherto the bond of such nations as had as yet existed. The great city itself had sprung up and flourished by the strict union of these four things. After its career of foreign conquest had substituted for the government of a city the great Roman confederation, it had indeed, like the preceding world-empires, in fact disregarded all these, being supported by a force independent of them all. But that force was material power. The great statue was of iron. It was a novelty unheard of as yet among the gentiles and unimagined by poet or philosopher, to create a polity which, disregarding sameness of race, of language, and of locality, should exist and maintain itself throughout the whole earth solely by the force of faith and charity.

Such was the idea of Christians about themselves from the beginning. The idea preceded the fact. The prophets foretold it; the Apostles proclaimed it:[272 - Zach. ii. 11, Is. ii. 2, Mich. iv. 1, compared with Titus ii. 14 and 1 Pet. ii. 9.] let us observe the fulfilment of the prophecy and the proclamation. We will take our stand in the middle of the third century, when seven full generations have passed since the day of Pentecost. In this time a people has been formed. Already a hundred and fifty years before an eyewitness among themselves had observed the nature of this people. “Christians are not distinguished from other men either by country, or by language, or by customs: for they have no cities peculiar to themselves, nor any language different from others, nor singularity in their mode of life… But they dwell both in Greek and in barbarous cities, as the lot of each may be, following local customs as to raiment and food, and the rest of their life, but exhibiting withal a polity of their own, marvellous and truly incredible. They dwell in their own country, but it is as sojourners; they share in everything as citizens, yet suffer everything as strangers. Every foreign land is to them a country, and every country a foreign land… In a word, what the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul is diffused through all the limbs of the body, and Christians through all the cities of the world… The soul is shut within the body, of which it is the bond, and Christians are like a garrison in the world, which they hold together.”[273 - Ep. ad Diognetum, 5, 6.]

Here a writer, calling himself a disciple of Apostles, describes to us, at the beginning of the second century, what the apostolic age of seventy years had wrought. He puts his finger just upon the marvel which we are contemplating. Fifty years later, at the moment the empire was culminating under the serene rule of Antoninus, a convert from heathenism, a philosopher who had spent his life in examining all the sects and races of the empire, and who afterwards became a martyr, said of Christians that being “quarried out of the side of Christ, they were the true Israelitic race,” “altogether being called the body, for both people and church, being many in number, are called by one name as one thing;” they are in fact “as one man before the Maker of all things, through the name of His first-born Son,” the High-priest gathering up first in the prophetical vision and then in the real fact “the true high-priestly race”[274 - S. Justin Martyr, Tryphon, sec. 135, 42, 116; where he refers to and explains the vision of the high-priest Jesus in the prophet Zacharias iii. 1.] in His own Person. Thus Justin pointed out this conception of the Christian people to the Jew of his time as both foretold in prophecy and exhibited in fact. The longer that such a people as this endured, the greater would be the marvel.

A hundred years after this, Origen uses the same language and points to the same marvel. He had in the year 249, at the entreaty of a friend and pupil, set himself in the maturity of life, and of a renown which filled the Church as no man's before had filled it, to answer the attack of a heathen philosopher, Celsus, upon Christianity. He was writing just at the end of the longest period of peace which is found during those three centuries. From the death of the Emperor Septimius Severus in 211 to that of the Emperor Philip in this year 249, there had been, with the exception of a short attack from Maximin, to which his death put a stop, no general persecution of Christians. Thus thirty-eight years had passed of such tranquillity as it was ever in those times the lot of Christians to obtain. The mother of one emperor had been Origen's disciple, and the emperor actually reigning was a Christian, however unworthy of such a profession. Now in this work Origen speaks of the superiority of the Christian churches in each several place, as, for instance, at Athens, Corinth, Alexandria, to the heathen assemblies, and of the Christian rulers to the heathen. He puts it as a mark of divine power that God sending His Son, “a God come in human soul and body,”[275 - ὡς υἱὸν Θεοῦ, Θεὸν ἐληλυθότα ἐν ἀνθρωπίνῃ ψυχῇ καὶ σώματι. Cont. Cels. iii. 29.] should have established everywhere churches offering the contrast of their polity to the assemblies of the superstitious, the impure, and the unjust. He considers that Christians do a greater benefit to their country than all other men by teaching them piety to the one God, and “gathering up into a certain divine and heavenly city those who have lived well in the smallest cities.”[276 - Ibid. viii. 74.] “We,” he says, “knowing that there is in each city another fabric of a country, founded by the word of God, call those who are powerful in word and of a virtuous life to the government of churches: we do not accept the covetous to such a place, but force it against their will upon those who in their moderation would decline taking on them this general care of the Church of God.”[277 - Cont. Cels. viii. 75.] And the compulsion thus exercised is that “of the great King, whom we are persuaded to be the Son of God, God the Word.” But this other form of country which he saw in each city is “the whole Church of God, which the divine scriptures assert to be the Body of Christ, animated by the Son of God, while the limbs of this Body are particular believers; for as the soul quickens and moves the body, whose nature it is not to have the movement of life from itself, so the Word moving to what is fitting, and energising in the whole Body, the Church, moves likewise each member of it, who does nothing without the Word.”[278 - Ibid. vi. 48, p. 670.] And he completes this view in another beautiful passage wherein he describes Christ as the high-priest Aaron, who has received upon his single body the whole chrism, from whom it flows down upon his beard, the symbol of the complete man, and on to the utmost skirt of his raiment. Every one who partakes of Him, partakes likewise of his chrism, because Christ is the head of the Church, and the Church and Christ one Body.[279 - Cont. Cels. vi. 79, p. 692.] We have here in Origen's thought one and the same divine power, proceeding forth from the Incarnation, which forms first the Body of the Lord, and then gathers into this Body every individual as a copy of the Christ. The heathen scoffer had objected: why send forth one spirit into one corner of the earth? It was needed to breathe that spirit into many bodies, and to send them forth into all the world. Nay, replied Origen, “the whole Church of God – animated by the Son of God as the soul quickens and moves the body – was enough. It needed not that there should be many bodies and many souls, like that of Jesus, in the way you suppose, for the one Word as the sun of righteousness rising from Judea was sufficient to send forth rays that should reach every soul that would receive him.” He has done far more than you suggest: every member of that one Body has received according to his measure a due portion of anointment: after the model of the Christ, they too are Christs; “so that beginning in the body He should dawn in power and in spirit upon the universe of souls which would no longer be destitute of God.”

In Origen's mind, then, the greatness of the King lies specifically in this, that out of confusion He draws unity, out of those who were no people He forms a people, out of nations and tribes at enmity He moulds an indivisible kingdom, and from His own Body a Body which shall embrace a universe of souls, instinct with one life, and that His own. This was Origen's view of the work and triumph of Christ, as he saw it before him, at the eve of the great Decian persecution in 249.

Origen was writing this at a moment of great interest. It was the last year which preceded those two generations, in the course of which five great persecutions should be directed by the emperors against the Church. He was then a man of sixty-four. The son of a martyr, he had when a youth of eighteen beheld his father imprisoned for the faith, and had encouraged him to suffer the loss of all his goods, and death itself, without regarding that large family which must be left in penury, of whom Origen was the eldest. He was burning himself to share his father's sufferings. In the persecution of which this was the opening Eusebius tells us that seven of his disciples were martyrs: and, lastly, he was to undergo such cruelties himself in the persecution of Decius, then on the eve of breaking out, that he is believed to have died of their results. Now it is in this work that he speaks of the remarkable providence of God in preserving Christians, who by their religion were bound not to defend themselves, against the attacks of their enemies, for God, he says, had fought for them, and from time to time had stopped those who had risen up with the purpose of destroying them. Few and easily numbered were those who hitherto had suffered death for the Christian Faith, samples chosen by God as champions to encourage the rest, while He prevented their whole nation from being rooted out: for it was His purpose that this nation should be firmly rooted and consolidated, and the whole world be filled with its saving doctrine and discipline.[280 - Κωλύοντος τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸ πᾶν ἐκπολεμηθῆναι αὐτῶν ἔθνος; συστῆναι γὰρ αὐτὸ ἐβούλετο καὶ πληρωθῆναι πᾶσαν τὴν γῆν τῆς σωτηρίου ταύτης καὶ εὐσεβεστάτης διδασκαλίας. Cont. Cels. iii. 8. It must be remembered that Celsus in the passage to which this is an answer had asserted that the Christians had arisen out of the Jews through a sedition; which makes the train of thought pertinent. For Origen is contrasting the losses which occur through exterminating wars, such as a sedition, or civil war, excites, with the losses to the Christian body through martyrdom. The comparison therefore lies between the whole number of Christians viewed en masse and the martyrs. Lasaulx remarks that this was written before the Decian persecution.] Thus it was by His will alone that He scattered every plot directed against them, so that neither emperors, nor local governors, nor the people should be able to indulge their wrath beyond a certain point. Origen, when he thus wrote, could look back on a period of thirty-eight years, during which, with the exception of the severe but passing storm raised by the Emperor Maximin, peace had reigned: years which he had himself employed in unwearied labours of teaching, writing, and converting; in which he had directed and advised an emperor's mother, and seen a Christian emperor; in which he had witnessed a wonderful increase of the Christian people, and indeed of this increase his words above cited convey a faithful picture. He knew not the fearful trials which were to be encountered before that triumph of the truth which he already anticipated should be attained: or that God was about to accept from the grayhaired man the sacrifice which the impetuous youth had affronted without success. For scarcely has he written this book when he has to fly for his life before the edict of Decius, who will attempt to destroy the Christian religion, and to whose anger Pope S. Fabian falls a victim. Amid great peril after long delay the next Pope Cornelius is chosen. And now for the first time a new danger from within assaults the Church. Novatian, a Roman presbyter of great repute, attempts after the due election and consecration of Cornelius to usurp his place, and to divide the one flock of Christ. Under circumstances so wholly altered from those in which Origen above was writing, we come to our next witness, the man in all the Western Church the most renowned, as Origen was in the Eastern.

For it was on occasion of the first antipope, an effort, that is, within the See of Peter itself to arm the episcopal power at its very source against itself, to set an altar up against the legitimate altar, and to divide the sacraments of the Church from the Bride whose dowry they are, that S. Cyprian wrote his treatise on the Unity of the Church. “It was for the purpose of reminding his brethren that unity is the first element of the Christian state, and that those who break off from the principle of unity, which is lodged in the episcopate, even though they be confessors and martyrs, have no portion in the hopes of the gospel.”[281 - Preface to the Oxford edition of S. Cyprian's treatise on the Unity of the Church.] This definite purpose, so unlike that state of leisure and tranquillity in which Origen answered by thought and learning a speculative attack, will account for the very remarkable precision and force of S. Cyprian's language.

“The enemy,” he says, “detected and down-fallen by the advent of Christ, now that light is come to the nations – seeing his idols left – has made heresies and schisms, wherewith to subvert faith, to corrupt truth, and to rend unity.” But this will all be in vain if men will look to the Head, and keep to the doctrine of the Master. For the truth may be quickly stated.[282 - De Unitate, iii. &c.] “The Lord saith unto Peter: I say unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. To him again, after His resurrection, He says: Feed my sheep. Upon him, being one, He builds His Church; and though He gives to all the Apostles an equal power, and says: As my Father sent Me, even so send I you; receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins ye remit, they shall be remitted to him, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they shall be retained; – yet in order to manifest unity, He has by His own authority so placed the source of the same unity as to begin from one. Certainly the other Apostles also were what Peter was, endued with an equal fellowship both of honour and power; but a commencement is made from unity, that the Church may be set before us as one: which one Church in the Canticle of Canticles doth the Holy Spirit design and name in the Person of our Lord: My dove, my spotless one is but one; she is the only one of her mother, elect of her that bare her.

“He who holds not this unity of the Church, does he think that he holds the faith? He who strives against and resists the Church, is he assured that he is in the Church? For the blessed Apostle Paul teaches this same thing, and manifests the sacrament of unity thus speaking: There is one Body and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one Hope of your calling; one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God. This unity firmly should we hold and maintain, especially we bishops, presiding in the Church, in order that we may approve the Episcopate itself to be one and undivided. Let no one deceive the brotherhood by falsehood; no one corrupt the truth of our faith by a faithless treachery. The Episcopate is one, of which a part is held by each without division of the whole. The Church is likewise one, though she be spread abroad, and multiplies with the increase of her progeny: even as the sun has rays many, yet one light, and the tree boughs many, yet its strength is one, seated in the deep-lodged root; and as, when many streams flow down from one source, though a multiplicity of waters seems to be diffused from the bountifulness of the overflowing abundance, unity is preserved in the source itself. Part a ray of the sun from its orb, and its unity forbids this division of light; break a branch from the tree, once broken it can bud no more; cut the stream from its fountain, the remnant will be dried up. Thus the Church, flooded with the light of the Lord, puts forth her rays through the whole world, with yet one light, which is spread upon all places, while its unity of body is not infringed. She stretches forth her branches over the universal earth, in the riches of plenty, and pours abroad her bountiful and onward streams; yet is there one head, one source, one mother, abundant in the results of her fruitfulness.

“It is of her womb that we are born; our nourishing is from her milk, our quickening from her breath. The Spouse of Christ cannot become adulterate; she is undefiled and chaste; owning but one home, and guarding with virtuous modesty the sanctity of one chamber. She it is who keeps us for God, and appoints unto the kingdom the sons she has borne. Whosoever parts company with the Church and joins himself to an adulteress, is estranged from the promises of the Church. He who leaves the Church of Christ, attains not to Christ's rewards. He is an alien, an outcast, an enemy. He can no longer have God for a Father who has not the Church for a mother. If any man was able to escape who remained without the ark of Noah, then will that man escape who is out of doors beyond the Church. The Lord warns us and says: He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who gathereth not with Me, scattereth. He who breaks the peace and concord of Christ, sets himself against Christ. He who gathers elsewhere but in the Church, scatters the Church of Christ. The Lord says: I and the Father are one; and again of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost it is written: And these three are one. And does anyone think that oneness, thus proceeding from the divine immutability, and cohering in heavenly sacraments, admits of being sundered in the Church, and split by the divorce of antagonist wills? He who holds not this unity holds not the law of God, holds not the faith of Father and Son, holds not the truth unto salvation.

“This sacrament of unity, this bond of concord inseparably cohering, is signified in the place in the Gospel where the coat of our Lord Jesus Christ is in nowise parted or cut, but is received a whole garment, by them who cast lots who should rather wear it, and is possessed as an inviolate and individual robe. The divine scripture thus speaks: But for the coat, because it was not sewed, but woven from the top throughout, they said one to another, Let us not rend it, but cast lots whose it shall be. It has with it a unity descending from above, as coming, that is, from heaven and from the Father; which it was not for the receiver and owner in anywise to sunder, but which he received once for all and indivisibly as one unbroken whole. He cannot own Christ's garment who splits and divides Christ's Church. On the other hand, when on Solomon's death his kingdom and people were split in parts, Ahijah the prophet, meeting King Jeroboam in the field, rent his garment into twelve pieces, saying: Take thee ten pieces; for thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee; and two tribes shall be to him for my servant David's sake, and for Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen, to place my name there. When the twelve tribes of Israel were torn asunder, the prophet Ahijah rent his garment. But because Christ's people cannot be rent, His coat, woven and conjoined throughout, was not divided by those to whom it fell. Individual, conjoined, coentwined, it shows the coherent concord of our people who put on Christ. In the sacrament and sign of His garment, He has declared the unity of His Church.

“Who, then, is the criminal and traitor, who so inflamed by the madness of discord, as to think aught can rend, or to venture on rending God's unity, the Lord's garment, Christ's Church? He Himself warns us in His Gospel and teaches, saying: And there shall be one Fold and one Shepherd… Think you that any can stand and live who withdraws from the Church, and forms for himself new homes and different domiciles?.. Believers have no house but the Church only. This house, this hostelry of unanimity, the Holy Spirit designs and betokens in the Psalms, thus speaking: God who makes men to dwell with one mind in a house. In the house of God, in the Church of Christ, men dwell with one mind, and persevere in concord and simplicity.” To this he adds: “There is one God, and one Christ, and His Church one, and the Faith one, and one the people joined into the solid unity of a body by the cement of concord. Unity cannot be sundered, nor can one body be divided by a dissolution of its structure, nor be severed into pieces with torn and lacerated vitals. Parted from the womb nothing can live and breathe in its separated state: it loses its principle of health;” for “charity will ever exist in the kingdom; she will abide evermore in the unity of a brotherhood which entwines itself around her.”

And he is more specific still; for this “one Church is founded by the Lord Christ upon Peter, having its source and its principle in unity,” “on whose person He built the Church, and in whom He began and exhibited the source of unity.”[283 - Epist. 70 and 73.]

Certainly if any idea has ever been put forth clearly and definitely, it would seem to be the idea of organic unity here delineated by Cyprian, as necessary not merely to the well-being but to the essence of the Church. Nor does one see what words he could have found more expressly to reject the notion that the individual bishop in his diocese was the unit on the aggregation of which the Church was built, and to assert in contradiction that the Church was built on the Primacy of Peter as its generative, formative, controlling, and unifying power. According to him the whole order and government of the Church are bound up in the Lord's words to Peter: while as to the Church herself three ideas are in his mind so compacted together, so running into and pervading each other, that they cannot be severed; and these ideas are Unity, Grace, and Truth. The symbols of the Sun, the Tree, and the Fountain, the Lord's Coat, the one Flock tethered in one Fold under one Shepherd, the one House as opposed to sundry self-chosen domiciles, the Mother embracing her whole progeny in her womb, illustrate and enforce each other, and all contain the three ideas, of which Grace and Truth are as the warp and woof in which the substance of the one web consists. For Unity, Truth, and Grace, viewed as attributes of the Church, are blended together in the light and warmth of the sun, in the sap which vivifies every branch of the tree, and gives it fruitfulness from the root, in the fountain of water, under which image our Lord has so often summed up His whole gift to man, in the flock which the Shepherd has chosen, and for which He cares, in the house where the master dwells and collects his family, in the one robe which encompassed and contained the virtue of the Wearer, in the prolific womb which gives birth to the whole sacred race. The force of all these images lies in their unicity: plurality would not modify, but destroy them. Yet even these symbols are surpassed by that argument from the divine Unity which he sets forth as the type and cause of the Church's unity. From created likenesses – the fairest and choicest which the world presents – he passes to the uncreated nature, and from the divine immutability, wherewith these three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the divine Exemplar of Unity, Truth, and Grace, are one, deduces the Unity of the Church their dwelling-place.

Cyprian, then, cannot sever the Church of his heart, the Church for which he lived and died, from Unity, or from Truth, or from Grace: and this Church is to him founded on the Primacy of Peter, and developed from his person. The one Episcopate, whose golden chain he looks upon as surrounding the earth in its embrace, “of which a part is held by each without division of the whole,” wherein therefore joint possession is dependent on unity, would have no existence without the bond of the Primacy, from which it was developed and which keeps it one. Take away this, and the office of each bishop is crystallised into a separate mass, having no coherence or impact with its like: bishops so conceived would hold indeed a similar office, but being detached from each other would not hold joint possession of one Episcopate. Separate crystals do not make one body; nor a heap of pebbles a rock. But it was a Rock on which Christ built and builds His Church, that Rock being His own Person, from which He communicated this virtue, wherein the cohesion and impact of the whole Episcopate lies, to the See of him whom He constituted His Vicar. Finally, Cyprian contrasts pointedly the people of Christ which cannot be rent with the twelve tribes of Israel, which were torn asunder: as if he would beforehand repudiate that parallel between the Synagogue and the Church, in the question of unity, which has before now been resorted to as a refuge by minds in distress, who failed to see the tokens of the Bride of Christ in the community to which they belonged.

In Origen and in Cyprian we put ourselves back into the middle of the third century. In the words of the latter we see portrayed to the life that idea which had filled the hearts of Christians through seven generations of labours and sorrows from the day of Pentecost down to his time. But whence arose this perfect union of all hearts and minds in the early Christians, who were penetrated with the conviction that the Church was the home of truth and grace? We may answer this question thus: No catechumen was received into the fold without a clear and distinct belief in that article of the earliest creed, and part of the baptismal profession, “the Holy Catholic Church.” A new word was made to express a new idea, the glorious and unique work of that ever-blessed Trinity whom the creed recited: the Home and House in which the Triune God, whom the Christian glorified, by indwelling made the fountain of that grace and that truth which God had become Man in order to communicate. The catechumen's baptism into the one Body was the foundation of all the hope in which his life consisted;[284 - τῇ γὰρ ἐλπίδι ἐσώθημεν.] the integrity, duration, sanctity of that Body being component parts of the hope. And with regard at least to all gentile converts this precise and definite catechetical instruction was reinforced by the new sense which at their conversion was impressed on them of the heathenism out of which they were then taken. In how many of them was the remembrance of their past life connected with the guilt of deeds and habits which their new Christian conscience taught them to regard as fearful sins. Nay, the notion of sin itself – as a transgression of the eternal law and an offence against the personal Majesty of God – was a Christian acquisition to the corrupted heathen. Thus the passage into the one Body and the divine Kingdom was contemporaneous in their case with a total change of the moral life. It is Cyprian, again, who has given us a vivid account of this change, which took place at a time of mature manhood in his own life, and which will serve as a graphic sketch of what had happened to the great mass of adult converts besides himself.

Let us suppose a man forty-five years of age speaking: “For me, while I yet lay in darkness and bewildering night, and was tossed to and fro on the billows of this troublesome world, ignorant of my true life, an outcast from light and truth, I used to think that second birth, which divine mercy promised for my salvation, a hard saying according to the life I then led: as if a man could be so quickened to a new life in the laver of healing water as to put off his natural self, and keep his former tabernacle, yet be changed in heart and soul. How is it possible, said I, for so great a conversion to be accomplished, so that both the obstinate defilement of our natural substance, and old and ingrained habits, should suddenly and rapidly be put off; evils whose roots are deeply seated within? When does he learn frugality, to whom fine feasts and rich banquets have become a habit? Or he who in gay sumptuous robes glisters with gold and purple, when does he reduce himself to ordinary and simple raiment? Another whose bent is to public distinctions and honours cannot bear to become a private and unnoticed man; while one who is thronged by a phalanx of dependents, and retinued by the overflowing attendance of an obsequious host, thinks it punishment to be alone. The temptation still unrelaxed, need is it that, as before, wine should entice, pride inflate, anger inflame, covetousness disquiet, cruelty stimulate, ambition delight, and lust lead headlong.

“Such were my frequent musings; for whereas I was encumbered with the many sins of my past life, which it seemed impossible to be rid of, so I had used myself to give way to my clinging infirmities, and, from despair of better things, to humour the evils of my heart, as slaves born in my house and my proper offspring. But after that life-giving water succoured me, washing away the stain of former years, and pouring into my cleansed and hallowed breast the light which comes from heaven, after that I drank in the heavenly Spirit, and was created into a new man by a second birth, then marvellously what before was doubtful became plain to me, what was hidden was revealed, what was dark began to shine, what was difficult now had a way and means, what had seemed impossible now could be achieved, what was in me of the guilty flesh now confessed that it was earthy, what was quickened in me by the Holy Ghost now had a growth according to God. Thou knowest well, thou canst recollect as well as I, what was then taken from me, and what was given by that death of sin, that quickening power of holiness. Thou knowest, I name it not; over my own praises it were unwelcome to boast, though that is ground never for boasting but for gratitude, which is not ascribed to man's virtue but is confessed to be God's bounty; so that to sin no more has come of faith, as heretofore to sin had come of human error. From God, I say, from God is all we can be; from Him we live, from Him we grow, and by that strength which is from Him accepted and ingathered we learn beforehand, even in this present state, the foretokens of what is yet to be. Let only fear be a guard upon innocency, that that Lord who by the influence of His heavenly mercy has graciously shone into our hearts, may be detained by righteous obedience in the hostelry of a mind that pleases Him; that the security imparted to us may not beget slothfulness, nor the former enemy steal upon us anew.”[285 - Ep. 1, Oxford translation.]

Add to this that Christians were marked out as one Body by the Jewish and heathen persecution which tracked them everywhere. But the sects were not persecuted. The various schools of the Gnostics all agreed in this, that it was not necessary or desirable to suffer martyrdom for the faith. Their view was, that they could believe with their minds whatever they pleased, though an enemy might force them by threats of suffering to utter with the mouth what they abhorred; and with this convenient distinction they escaped imprisonment, poverty, bereavement, and death. But the Christian was bound – when the fitting circumstances came – to repeat the confession of his Lord before Pilate. Joined therefore to his baptismal belief, and to the utter change of life involved in his conversion, was the bond of common suffering which held together Christians as one Body throughout the world: whence an old martyr bishop said: “The Church, for that love which she bears to God, in every place and at every time sends forward a multitude of martyrs to the Father, whereas all the rest not only have no such thing among themselves to show, but deem not even such a witness necessary.”[286 - S. Irenæus, lib. iv. 33 g.]

Moreover, as a fourth cause, the historic origin of their name and belief led them up to that day of Pentecost when the descent of the Spirit of God constituted the formation of that body in belonging to which was all their hope and trust; with the existence of which their faith was identified; in the communion of which their charity was engendered. As the birth and the life and the passion of Christ were that subject-matter on which their whole faith grew, so the creation of their existence as a people was a definite act in which the Redeemer showed Himself the Father of His Race, creating them as His children and generating them by His Spirit. The loving thought of Christians in every age ran along this line to its source. Nature herself presents us with an image of what this idea of the Church was to them. As the great river whose water is the symbol of blessing and the bearer of fertility leaps down a giant birth from its parent lake, ever blazing under the splendour of a tropical sun, yet ever fed by sources springing from snow-crowned mountains, and changes in its course the desert into earth's fruitfulest region, so the river of God, welling forth on the day of Pentecost from the central abyss of the divine love, bore down to all the nations the one water of salvation, and wheresoever it spread, the desert retreated, and the earth brought forth corn and wine in abundance. And the idea of this divine stream was from the beginning as deep as it was clear in every Christian heart. It is one of a very few doctrines, such as the unity of the Godhead, whereof indeed it is the image and the result, of which there is not only an implicit belief but a definite consciousness from the first. For the thought of the kingdom is inseparable from that of the king: and he could be no divine Sovereign whose realm was not one and indivisible: and that this realm should break in pieces and consume all other kingdoms,[287 - Dan. ii. 44. Compare Apoc. i. 9. ὁ ἀδελφὸς ὑμῶν καὶ συγκοινωνὸς ἐν τῇ θλίψει καὶ ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ καὶ ὑπομονῇ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.] but itself stand for ever, was the trust on which the whole Christian life of endurance and hope was built.

The Christian society through its whole structure was marked with the seal of that great act on which it grew, the assumption of human nature by a divine Person. Its whole government, its whole worship, and the whole moral and spiritual being of its people radiate from that Person as King, as Priest, and as Prophet. Take first the character of the individual Christian. It is in all its gradations, in that marvellous range of the same being which stretches from the highest saint matured in acting and suffering to the most imperfect penitent received into the bosom of the one mother, a copy, more or less resembling, of our Lord Himself. He, the divine Image, is the original from which every Christian lineament is traced, and every one of His race repeats Him in some degree. Every virtue is such as a transcript of some portion of His character; and the whole life of the individual resolves itself into an imitation of Him. Thus He is the Prophet not only declaring the whole divine will to men, but leading them in it by His own example. The divine Painter is but representing in every one of His children a copy in some sort of that life, which He set forth in full in the thirty-three years: a thought which we have seen Origen expressing in the chrism which descended from the head of Aaron to the utmost skirt of his raiment.

But likewise in His Priesthood a parallel derivation ensues. First He multiplies Himself in His Apostles: they again in the Bishops whom they create; while each of these communicates himself in his priests. A triple transfusion suffices to form the whole hierarchical order. Nothing can be conceived more simple, yet nothing more efficient supposing that He is what He proclaimed Himself to be. The victim which He appoints to be offered by this priesthood is Himself, and His Body so offered is the food, the life, and the bond of the whole spiritual Body thus created. That Person with which He took the manhood is the centre of all this worship, of which the manhood so taken is the instrument. Thus it is that His second office of Priest, bound up so entirely with Himself, is yet communicated through His divine manhood to the whole Body which He forms. And this order remains through all ages, as intimately connected with his Person now, as eighteen centuries ago, and as it will be when all the centuries to come are evolved.

One office remains; His office of King. And here, again, the jurisdiction which He created for His kingdom springs from His Person, and that not only in its origin but in its perpetual derivation. He was Himself[288 - Κατανοήσατε τὸν ἀπόστολον καὶ ἀρχιερέα τῆς ὁμολογίας ἡμῶν Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν. Heb. iii. 1.] the Apostle: as such He first multiplied Himself in the Twelve, whom from Himself He named Apostles. His public life on earth is an image of the whole mission or government which He would set up after His ascension. He lives with the Twelve: He teaches them: He is their Instructor, Father, and Friend. When His Apostles afterwards created Bishops, this form of our Lord's life on earth was exactly reproduced in the earliest dioceses. Thus S. Mark went forth from the side of Peter, and the mode of his living, and the family which he drew around him at Alexandria was after this pattern. He, the Bishop, is the image of Christ, and his twelve presbyters of the Apostles. This model is continually set forth by S. Ignatius as a divine command and institution, he being himself the occupant of the great Mother See of the East, the third See of Peter, and that wherein he first sat.[289 - Thus S. Gregory the Great wrote to Eulogius, Patriarch of Alexandria, that the three original patriarchal Sees were all Sees of Peter: “Cum multi sint Apostoli, pro ipso tamen principatu sola Apostolorum Principis Sedes in auctoritate convaluit, quæ in tribus locis unius est.” Epist. lib. vii. 40. The Patriarchal authority is a derivation from the Primacy, which is the well-head.] Thus the canonical life was formed by the exactest imitation of our Lord's public life, and its reproduction throughout the various dioceses formed the Church. Such was the life which S. Augustine afterwards practised and reduced to rule; and those who planted the Christian Faith throughout the north, Apostles to new and barbarous races, had this model before them. The diocese was first a family, in which the Bishop as a father presided over his priests, and sent them forth to their work. The Eucharist which he consecrated was from the beginning dispensed from his church to all his flock. The diocese, then, in its earliest form was an image of our Lord's intercourse with the Twelve, wherein the Bishop represents Him, and the priesthood His Apostles.

But the whole Church in its episcopate or mass of dioceses no less represented that His public life. For as He was the Head, the Living Teacher and Guide of His Apostles, and as He came to establish one Kingdom, and one only,[290 - Κηρύσσων τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας. Matt. iv. 23.] wherein the Twelve represented the whole Episcopate, and contained in themselves its powers, so the Primacy which He visibly exercised among them, He delegated, when He left them, to one of their number. Peter, when he received that commission to feed His sheep, took the place on earth of the great Shepherd, and in him the flock remains one.

Thus the double power which expresses the divinely-established government of the Church, the Primacy and the Episcopate, is as close a transcript of the Lord's life on earth with His Apostles as the diocese taken by itself. In His intercourse with His Apostles He is the germ of the Bishop with his priests; in His Vicariate bestowed upon Peter He repeats or rather continues His visible Headship on earth.

But spiritual jurisdiction is the expression of Christ's sovereignty on earth, and in the order just described it is linked with His Person as strictly as the worship exercised by means of His Priesthood, and the spiritual character which every one of His children bears. Surely no kingdom has ever been so contained in its king, no family in its father, no worship in its object, as the Christian kingdom, family, and worship, which together is the Church. Is it, then, any wonder that all Christian hearts from the first were filled with the blessing of belonging to such a creation as this, in which to them their Redeemer lived and reigned, penetrated them with His own life, and gathered them in His kingdom? Are not the words of S. Cyprian just what we should expect those to utter who overflowed with this conviction? At the same time that Cyprian was so writing, Dionysius, the Archbishop of Alexandria, addressed Novatian the antipope in these words: “It was better to suffer any extremity in order not to divide the Church of God. And martyrdom endured to prevent schism were not less glorious than that endured to refuse idolatry, but in my opinion more so. For in the one case a man suffers martyrdom for his own single soul, but in the other for the whole Church.”[291 - S. Dionys. Alex. Ep. 2. Gallandi, iii. 512.]

But let us trace the chronological sequence in history of that great institution, the real as well as logical coherence of which has just been set forth. The Church was a fact long before its theory became the subject of reflection. It came forth from the mind of the divine Architect and established itself among men through His power; and it is only when this was done that the creative thought according to which it grew could be delineated.

The fact, then, exactly agrees with the theory, and history here interprets dogma.

It is during the great forty days that our Lord founded the Primacy, when He made S. John and the rest of the Apostles sheep of Peter's fold. The period of thirty-eight years which follows is the carrying into effect His design in the first stage. The Church grows around Peter. First in Jerusalem he forms a mass of disciples; then for a certain number of years at Antioch. In the second year of Claudius, the thirteenth after the Ascension, he lays the foundations of the Roman Church. In the sixtieth year of our era he sends forth S. Mark to found the Christian society in Alexandria. Thus he takes possession of the three great cities of the empire, of east, west, and south. In the mean time the labours of S. Paul and the other Apostles, in conjunction with those of Peter and in subordination to them, plant the Christian root in a great number of cities. As S. Paul toils all round the northern circuit of the empire, through Asia Minor, Macedonia, Illyricum, to Spain, his work has a manifest reference to the work of Peter in the metropolis of the east, of the south, and of the west. In the latter he joins his elder brother, and the two Princes of the Apostles offer up their lives together on the same day in that city which was to be the perpetual citadel of the Christian Faith, the immovable Rock of a divine Capitol. Thus was it Peter, “from whom the very Episcopate, and all the authority of this title sprung,”[292 - Answer of Pope Innocent I. to the Council of Carthage in 416, among the letters of S. Augustine.] and what Pope Boniface wrote in 422 is a simple fact of history: that “the formation of the universal Church at its birth took its beginning from the honour of blessed Peter, in whose person its regimen and sum consists. For from his fountain the stream of ecclesiastical discipline flowed forth into all churches, as the culture of religion progressively advanced.”[293 - Constant. Epist. Rom. Pontif. p. 1037.] Thus the whole initial movement was from above downwards, and S. Cyprian was not only enunciating dogma but speaking history when he wrote that the Lord built the Church upon Peter. In one generation the structure rose above the ground, and during all that time S. Peter's hand directed the work.

Just at the end of this time, on the point of being thrown into prison, whence he only emerged to martyrdom, Paul was at Rome with Peter, and he describes in imperishable words the work which had been already accomplished. Again it is not only dogma but history, not only that which was always to be but that which already was, which he set forth as it were with his dying voice: the one Body, and the one Spirit, the one Lord, one Faith, and one Baptism, as there is one God. That Body in which Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers were fixed, that the visible structure might grow up to its final stature, in whose accordant unity was the perpetual safeguard against error. When Paul so wrote,[294 - Ephes. iv., written during S. Paul's imprisonment at Rome.] the Body was formed, and its headship was incontestably with Peter. He had no need to remind them of the man with whom he was labouring, of whose work the whole Church from Rome to Antioch and Alexandria was the fruit. But he places the maintenance of truth, and the perpetual fountain of grace, in the unity of the Church, which was before those to whom he wrote an accomplished fact.

Two generations pass and the aged S. Ignatius, on his way to martyrdom, attests the same fact. “Where is Jesus Christ,” he says, “there is the Catholic Church.” The King is in His Kingdom; the Master in His House; the Lord in His Temple. The bishops throughout the world inseparably linked together are His mind: and the presidency of charity, which is the inner life of all this spiritual empire, is at Rome. S. Ignatius and the author of the letter to Diognetus write just after the expiration of the apostolic period; and they both regard Christians as one mass throughout the world, living under a divine form of spiritual government. No one who studies their words can doubt that the one Body and the one Spirit were as visible to their eyes and as dear to their heart as to S. Paul.

We pass two generations further and S. Irenæus repeats the same testimony. The interval has been filled by incessant attacks of heresies, and the Bishop of Lyons dwells upon the fact that the Church speaks with one voice through all the regions of the earth as being one House of God, and that the seat of this its unity is in the great See founded by the Princes of the Apostles at Rome. He reproduces at great length the statements of S. Paul that the safeguard of truth lies in the one apostolic ministry, for which he runs up to the fountain-head in Rome. It is in the living voice and the teaching office of the Church that he sees a perpetual preservative against whatever error may arise. Thus it has been up to his time, and thus it will ever be.

Another period of seventy years runs on, and we come to the just-cited testimony of Cyprian, who therefore said nothing new, nor anything exaggerated; but when the truth was assailed in its very citadel, he spoke out and described wherein its strength lay. He gathers up and gives expression to the two hundred and twenty years between the day of Pentecost and his own time. Here are the creative words of our Apostle and High-priest explained and attested and exhibited as having passed into fact by four witnesses, first S. Paul, then S. Ignatius, thirdly S. Irenæus, fourthly S. Cyprian. Between all the five there is no shadow of divergence, between the Master who designed the building and the servants who described its erection; between the Prophet who foretold and the historians who recorded. The one said, Upon this rock I will build my Church; the others pointed out that the work was accomplished.

The original and fundamental conception of all this work is expressed by S. Matthew and S. Mark when they speak of our Lord at His first going forth as “proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom.” His three years' ministry is the germ and type of the perpetual mission which He founded. It was to be from first to last a work of personal ministry, beginning from above, not spreading from below; its power and virtue descending from Him through those whom He chose, the people being the work of the Prince, their government a delegation from Him, as their moral condition lay in following Him, and their life and support in feeding on Him. And He declared that the original conception should be carried out to the end, and that “the gospel of the kingdom” should be proclaimed through the whole world as a witness to all nations, until the consummation should come.[295 - This text is continually used by S. Augustine against the Donatists, as containing an express divine prophecy that the one Catholic Church should continue to the end of the world. The Gospel of the Kingdom, and the Gospel without the Kingdom, are ideas far as the poles apart.]