of teaching all nations, utilizes their gifts in bringing out the great truths committed to her care by her divine Founder. It is in this cooperation with the work of the church that the different nations and races of men find the inspiration of their genius, the noblest employment of their highest faculties, and the realization of their providential mission upon earth. For the scattered rays of religious truth which were held by the different nations and races of men under paganism were derived from primitive revelation, and it is only when these are brought within the focus of the light of universal truth that their complete significance is appreciated, and they are seen in all their original splendor. The Catholic Church, in this aspect, is the reintegration of natural religion with the truths contained in primitive revelation and their perfect fulfilment. Moreover, there is no truth contained in any of the ancient religions before the coming of Christ, or affirmed by any of the heresies since that event, or that may be hereafter affirmed, which is not contained, in all its integrity, in Catholicity. This is only saying, in other words, The Catholic Church is catholic.
But these men do not see the church, and they appear to regard Christianity as still an unorganized mass, and they are possessed with the idea that the task is imposed upon them to organize the Christian Church; and this work occupied and perplexed them not a little in their Unitarian biennial conference held in the town of Saratoga, in the United States of North America, in the month of September, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-six!
“Poor wanderers! ye are sore distrest
To find the path which Christ has blest,
Tracked by his saintly throng;
Each claims to trust his own weak will—
Blind idol!—so ye languish still,
All wranglers, and all wrong.”[95]
Were the veil taken from their spiritual eyes, and did they behold the church as she is, they would easily comprehend that her unbroken existence for nineteen centuries alone, saying nothing of what glory is in store for her in the future, is a more evident and conclusive proof to us of the divinity of her Founder than the miracle of his raising Lazarus from the dead was to those who were actual witnesses to it. For, in raising Lazarus from the dead, he had but to deal with passive matter, and that for only an instant; whereas in founding his church he had to exert his power and counteract all the attacks of the gates of hell, combined with the persecutions of the world and the perversities of men, during successive centuries until the end of all time. None but the living God could be the author of so potent, comprehensive, and indestructible a body as the Catholic Church. Of all the unanswerable testimonies of the divinity of Christ, there is none so forcible as that of the perpetual existence of the one, holy, Roman Catholic Church. She is the standing miracle of Christ.