“Organic unity,” he says, “is a required element in the moral power the church is yet to wield. The Romish Church has borrowed untold strength from this source—one in name and form the world over.”

Dr. Knox’s evidently reluctant compliment to the Catholic Church ought not to be passed by without due recognition. It is a very high compliment: the highest possible

compliment, according to his own showing. For he has laid down the principle that “the interior and spiritual are never dispersed from the exterior and physical.” Now, as the Catholic Church is “the world over one in name and form”—that is, in “the exterior and physical”—it follows she must be one in “the interior and spiritual,” as the former are never “dispersed from” the latter. The Catholic Church, therefore, is truly the church of Christ, as she alone is “perfect in one.” She alone possesses the inward and outward notes of that unity which Dr. Knox and those who agree with him are expecting to come as the ideal Christian Church. They have only to work out their premise to its logical conclusion to be landed in the bosom of the Catholic Church, which is the realization upon earth, so far as human nature will allow, of the ideal Christian Church.

“If her [the Catholic Church’s] actual unity,” he proceeds to say, “had answered to her organic, Protestantism must needs have been still heavier armed to make head against her.” This is not a reasonable supposition. Prior to the sixteenth century the actual unity of the Catholic Church did answer to her organic, and she was in a fair way to Christianize and civilize the whole world. But the religious secession started by Luther and his followers stopped the church in her course, and set Christians against Christians, broke up the fraternity of Christian nations, and sowed everywhere the seeds of dispute, enmities, and wars in the bosom of Christendom. Millions of her children, backed up by political powers, turned against the church, and concentrated their attacks chiefly in the direction of the overthrow of

the Roman See, and the destruction of the centre and guardian of the unity of her organization, the Roman Pontiff. If her vital energies and vast resources were turned towards where the attacks were the fiercest, in order to meet and repel their effects, this was, in the nature of the situation, a necessity, and furnishes no ground for an accusation. But God in his providence turns the enemies of his church into instruments of her glory; for, as in repelling the errors of Arius and his adherents, the church was necessitated to define, and for ever establish beyond all dispute, her belief in the divinity of Christ, so in like manner, in her defence against the errors of Luther and his followers, she was compelled to settle beyond dispute all doubt of the authority, the rights, and prerogatives communicated by Christ to his Apostle Peter and to the successors of his see, the Roman Pontiffs. The bark of Peter has had to battle through a threatening storm which has lasted three centuries, but she has come out of the danger in perfect safety, with increased strength and renewed splendor. For her “organic unity,” thanks to the action of Protestantism, being greatly perfected, her “actual unity” now can display itself with a correspondingly-increased vigor and vitality. Her interior, spiritual beauty will be brought out more clearly to the sight of the world, attracting all souls; for whatever may be said of the power and majesty of her “name and form the world over,” the real beauty and glory of the church, like that of the king’s daughter, “is all within.” The glory of this new phase of the church, of which it seems Dr. Knox has had a glimpse, though he does not appear to recognize her features,

he expresses in the following manner: “But when the day dawns that shall give us a visible springing from an interior unity, that will be a spectacle like the sign of the Son of Man in the heavens.”

After the compliment which we have already noticed, it would be unusual if the holy Church did not receive some bitter words of abuse. Here they are in the concluding lines of the paragraph under notice:

“Though Satan, in the person of Rome and Rationalism, ‘dilated stood,’ as Milton describes him in his attitude towards Gabriel,

“he would know that sign, as when Gabriel showed him the golden scales aloft, and he

“‘Fled