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 [pg 167] 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 [pg 168] 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 [pg 169] 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 [pg 170] 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, [pg 171] 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, [pg 172] 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 [pg 173] 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 [pg 174] 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, [pg 175] 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.”
Chapter X. The First Age Of The Martyr Church.
“Magnum hæreditatis mysterium! Templum Dei factus est uterus nescientis virum. Non est pollutus ex ea carnem assumens. Omnes gentes venient dicentes, Gloria tibi, Domine.”