For indeed Christ is the Saviour, but of His mystical body, which[66] is the Church, which therefore He purchased with His own blood, joined to Himself by that closest bond of being His spouse, enriched with promises,[67] provided with all manner of graces, and most nobly dowered with[68] truth, charity, and the Holy Spirit, to give her at last salvation, and[69]"the weight of eternal glory." But have these things reference to a visible or an invisible Church? To a Church one and coherent, or rent and torn by factions? It is the Church which Christ founded, which He made to be[70] "the light of the world," bound together by[71] manifold external links, ordered to be one with the unity of a house, a family, a city, a kingdom; with that unity wherewith the Father and the Son are one; in which He placed[72] pastors and doctors to bind and to loose, and to watch over the agreement of all the parts; which He founded upon Peter, committed in chief to Peter to rule and to feed it. Such, then, as fall off from one single visible Church are of the condition of those whom the Apostles of the Lord foretold, that "in the last time there should come mockers, walking according to their own desires in ungodlinesses: these are they who separate themselves, sensual men, having not the[73] Spirit:" these tear themselves from their Saviour, lose the fruit purchased by His blood, and fall from the inheritance which the Head obtained for His body and His members.
Therefore the necessity of union with the one single visible Church is as great as the necessity of union with Christ the Head, as the necessity of the remission of sins, "for[74] outside of it they are not remitted: for this Church has specially received the Holy Spirit in earnest, without whom no sins are remitted:" as the necessity of charity, "[75]for it is this very charity which those who are cut off from the communion of the Catholic Church do not possess," whence "[76]whatsoever thing heretics and schismatics receive, the charity which covers a multitude of sins is the gift of Catholic unity and peace:" as great, in fine, as the necessity not to involve oneself "in[77] a horrible crime and sacrilege," "in[78] the greatest of evils," one "by[79] which Christ's passion is rendered of no effect, and His body is rent," by which[80] the sin is committed of which Christ said, "It shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the world to come:" by which one is estranged "from the sole Catholic Church, which retains the true worship, in which is the fountain of truth, the home of faith, the temple of God, into which if any one enter not, or from which if any one go out, he loses the hope of life and eternal salvation. Let no one flatter himself in the spirit of obstinate contention, for life is at issue, and salvation, which without care and caution will be forfeited."[81] Can any necessity be greater, or less conditional than this? Or what can be more plain than this statement of the simple and absolute necessity of visible unity and outward communion?
Where then are we to find the cause which induced so many learned and able Protestants first to imagine this distinction between the necessity of internal and external communion and unity, and then to deceive themselves and others with such a mockery? The real cause was, as I believe, that having denied the institution of the Primacy, and the authority lodged in it for the purpose of forming and maintaining unity, they were without a criterion or proof, in virtue of which, among so many Christian societies divided from and condemning each other, they could safely choose the one with which they were to be joined in communion, and the outward unity of duty and obedience. For they would readily conclude that the unity so often commended in Scripture, and so earnestly enjoined, could not be external, since God, who does not command impossibilities, had instituted no visible sign to mark that company of Christians, which alone among all the rest was the continuation and development of the Church founded by Christ, and built up by the Apostles.
C. From the same source must the third Protestant doctrine on unity be derived. [82]Jurien filled up the sketch of this, which [83]Casaubon, [84]Claude, and [85]Mestrezat had drawn, and it became so popular as not only to infect a large number of Protestants, but to exert a withering influence on certain unstable members of the Catholic body. It teaches that we must believe not only in an internal and spiritual, but in a visible and external unity, for the Scriptures plainly urge its necessity, and Christian tradition fully describes it, so that there is not a truth more patent or established on greater authority; but this unity is restricted within narrow bounds, and confined to the articles called fundamental, though as to how many these are no one defender of the system is agreed with another. For it is sufficient for Christians not to differ in the profession of such articles for them to be deemed members of one and the same Church. Whence they infer that one and the same true Church is made up out of almost all Christian societies, the Roman, the Greek, the Nestorian, the Eutychian, the Waldensian, the Lutheran, the Anglican, and the Calvinist, for their differences, important as they are, offer no hindrance to the unity which Christ enjoined, the Apostles preached, the creeds express, and universal tradition demands.
As Bossuet,[86] the brothers Walemburg,[87] Nicole,[88] and even some Protestants have most fully dealt with this portentous opinion, there is no need to urge much against it here. I prefer repeating the question, what occasion the Protestants had to get up so unheard-of a paradox, and a system so absurd? It was twofold: one theoretical, and the other practical.
The theoretical was this. The crime of heresy, depicted in Scripture, and Christian antiquity, with colours so dark, had gradually lost its foulness and its magnitude in the minds of Protestants, who had, at length, come to the pass of reckoning religious, as well as civil, liberty, among the unquestionable rights of man. As if, all other human acts being subject to a law, those alone which proceed from the intellect are exempt: as if the difference between right and wrong, which embraces the whole range of man's life, did not relate to its noblest part, in the acts of the intellect and the reason: as if God had laid down a law of justice, charity, fortitude, and prudence, but entirely omitted a law[89] of faith: as if the will submitted to a law of good, but the mind owned no law of truth: or as if God cared for the boughs and leaves, but took no thought of the root.[90] But what could Protestants do? Having allowed to all full license of thought, and overthrown the authority which ruled the mind, they were forced, while they kept the name of heresy, to give up the thing meant by it, and the effects springing from that thing: they were forced to attenuate to the utmost the crime of heresy, and to reduce to the smallest possible number the articles necessary to be believed by all; they were forced to extend beyond all measure the Church's limits, while they contracted beyond all measure the range of necessary unity.
Besides the theoretical, there was a practical occasion in those schisms which, not merely in later or in mediæval times, but in the first ages also, rent the Christian society. Jurien and Pfaff appeal to these, pretentiously enumerating those which arose under Popes Victor, Cornelius, Stephen, Urban VI., and Clement VII., and those named from Donatus, Meletius, and Acacius. Then they ask if the true Church of Christ can be thought to consist in one single society perfectly at union with itself. They allege many conjectures against this, but dwell on the argument, that in defect of a visible external test, such an assertion could not be maintained without imposing upon all a most intolerable burden of searching out where is the true doctrine and the legitimate ministerial succession: for it is not until those are found, that, at length, that one single society will be recognised, with which, as the only true Church, unity of Communion is to be kept.
Now, I profess that I do not see how this argument can be met, if the institution of the Primacy, and its proper function to form and maintain unity, be rejected. For, without this, by what visible token among so many Christian societies, divided by intestine dissension, and condemning each other, can you distinguish the one which has the character of the true Church, and the right to exact communion with itself? There is none to be found; and so, either all hope of finding the true Church must be relinquished, or an enquiry must be undertaken into purity of doctrine, and legitimate ministerial succession, on the termination of which the only true Church will at last be found. But as this latter course is to by far the greater number of men impossible, dangerous[91] to all without exception, and most foreign to the Christian temper, the only conclusion remaining, is, that the selection of a Primacy with the power of effecting unity impressed upon it, is most intimately involved and bound up in the visibility and unity of the true Church.
And quite as closely is it bound up with that other test of the Church, its Catholicism. We are not to believe Voss and King,[92] in their assertion that this test began to be applied first in the fourth century, for the purpose of distinguishing the genuine company of the orthodox, and the true body of Christ, from heretics and schismatics. For we find the Church distinguished by the epithet of Catholic, not merely in the records of the fourth[93] and fifth[94] century, but in those of the third,[95] and the second,[96] at the beginning of which S. Ignatius wrote, "Follow all of you the bishop, as Jesus Christ the Father; and the body of presbyters, as Apostles. But reverence deacons, as the command of Christ. Without the bishop let nothing of what concerns the Church be done by any one. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist which is under the bishop, or with his sanction. Where the bishop is, there also let the multitude be; as, where Christ Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church."[97] As, therefore, that cannot be the Church of Christ, which is not Catholic, we ought to investigate the meaning which is given to this word by the consent of all orthodox believers.
Now, two points are signified in it, one of which is its material, the other its formal, or essential, part. Its material part is, that the geographical extension of the true Church be such that its mass be morally[98] universal, absolutely great, and eminently visible, but comparatively with all heretical and schismatical sects, larger and more numerous. Of this material meaning attached to the epithet, Catholic, we find abundant witnesses in all[99] the orthodox writers who defended the cause of the Church against the Donatists, and again, against the Luciferians,[100] and Novatians; and likewise, in those who have explained the creeds,[101] and, as occasion offered, have touched on the force of the term Catholic.[102] But the same first cited witnesses tell us that universal diffusion is not sufficient, and that we require another element to infuse a soul into this universally extended body, and to bring it to unity.