This fact that man's normal life demands the supernatural, and that his own reason, though not able to know the superintelligible, or to say what it is, yet assures him that there is a superintelligible, fits him by nature to receive the supernatural revelation of the superintelligible; for it only supplies an indestructible and deeply felt want of his nature. His reason needs it and his nature craves it, and when receiving it relishes it as the hungry man does wholesome and appropriate food. As the natural and supernatural, the intelligible and superintelligible, are not contradictory or mutually repellant orders, but parts of one complete and indissoluble whole, only ordinary evidence is required to prove the fact of revelation; and as God is infinitely true, truth itself, his word, when we know that we have it, is ample authority, the highest possible, and the best of all conceivable reasons, for believing the revelation. So faith in a supernatural revelation, in whatever is proved to be the word of God, is, so far from being repugnant to reason or requiring an abdication of reason, the highest and freest act of reason possible.
The Professor objects to believing on the authority of the church, but we do not believe the revelation on the authority of the church; we take on her authority only the fact that it is divine revelation; the revelation itself we believe on the veracity of God. But, if we considered the church as a mere body, collection, or company of men, however wise, learned, or honest we might regard them, we should not hold her authority sufficient for believing that what she proposes as the revelation really is revelation. Every man taken individually is fallible, and no possible number, union, or combination of fallibles can make an infallible, and only an infallible authority is competent to declare what God has or has not revealed. The church is more than a collection, body, or company of individuals, as the human race, what our liberals call humanity, is more than an aggregation of individuals. There is, indeed, no humanity without individuals, but it is not itself individual, or dependent on individuals for its existence. The positivists, who would call no individual man divine, pretend that humanity is divine, and worship it as God. What the race is to individual men in the order of generation, that, in some sense, is the church to them in the order of regeneration. She lives not without them, but does not live by them. She is the regenerated race, and bears to Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, who was with God and who is God, the relation, in the order of regeneration, that the human race bears to Adam, its natural progenitor, and therefore she lives a divine and human life, which she receives not from her members, but imparts to them. Jesus Christ is the progenitor of regenerated humanity, and this regenerated humanity is in the largest sense what we call the church, in which sense it includes all the faithful, the laity as well as their pastors and teachers.
The church, again, is the body of our Lord, in which dwelleth the Holy Ghost. Individuals are to her what the particles which the body assimilates are to the body. There is no body without them, yet they are not, individually or collectively, the body. The life of the body is not derived from them, for the body, by a vital process, assimilates them to itself, not they the body to themselves. The body, when suffering from a fever or when deprived of food, assimilates them only feebly, and wastes away or grows thin, and, when dead, assimilates them not at all, which shows that the vital power which carries on the process of assimilation is in the body, not in the particles, a fact far better known to the Professor than to us, and a fact, too, which may help remove the difficulties sciolists imagine in the way of the resurrection of the body.
The vital power or principle which gives life to the body and enables it to carry on the process of assimilation and elimination, the church teaches, is the soul, for she has defined that the soul is the form of the body, Anima est forma oorporis. But this has nothing to do with our present purpose. The vital principle, the life of the church, is our Lord Jesus Christ himself. The Holy Ghost dwells in her as the soul in the body, animates her, guides and directs her, and therefore is she one, holy and Catholic, as he is one, holy and Catholic, infallible by his perpetual presence and assistance as he is infallible. The Word incarnate explicates his life in her as Adam explicates his life in the race. The infallibility is from the presence and assistance of the Holy Ghost, and is in her very interior life. The Word is in her, a living Word, and the infallibility attaches to her, to this interior Word which she lives, but not to individuals as such in her communion. The pope regarded as a man, irrespective of his office, is no more infallible than he is impeccable, or than is any Christian believer.
But the church as a body has her organs, and as a visible body she has visible organs, through which she teaches the truth she has received and expresses the life she lives. These organs are the bishops or pastors in communion with their visible head, the successor in the See of Rome of Blessed Peter, the Prince of the Apostles. We call them organs of the church, inasmuch as the faith and love, the truth and life, they express is her life, which in turn is the life of him who said, "Because I live ye shall live also," and, "Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world!" and who expressly declares himself "the way, the truth, and the life." The infallibility of the church comes from the indwelling Word and the assistance of the Holy Ghost; the infallibility of the organs comes from the infallibility of the church.
Now, supposing the church to be what we represent her to be, we presume even the Professor will acknowledge her to be fully competent to teach without error the revelation supernaturally made and committed to her, for the revelation committed to her is deposited externally with her bishops and pastors, and internally in her living and unfailing faith, in her very life and interior consciousness. It is both a recorded and a present living revelation, which she is living and explicating in her continuous activity, the Word spoken from the beginning, and the Word speaking now. "Say not," says St. Paul, (Rom. x. 6-8,) "in thy heart: Who shall ascend into heaven? that is, to bring Christ down: or who shall descend into the deep? that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead. But what saith the Scripture? The word is near thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: this is the word of faith, which we preach." This was addressed by St. Paul to Christian believers, "to all that are at Rome, the beloved of God, called to be saints," and shows that the Christian not only hears the word in his ears, but has it in his mouth, in his heart, that is, in his very life, and he lives and breathes it. It is the very element of his soul, and he can have no higher certainty, not even in case of a mathematical demonstration, than he has that his faith is true, and that it is the living God he believes. The Professor, then, in regard to the faithful, has no ground for asserting as he does an antithesis between "Rome and reason, the sovereign church and the free soul, God in our masters and God in us;" for Rome is the highest reason, the sovereign church is both external and internal, and God is both in us and in our teachers. We have not only the veracity of God as the ground of our faith, but a divinely constituted and assisted medium of bringing us to it, and sustaining it in us.
The church undoubtedly teaches the faith or divine revelation which has been committed to her through her pastors and doctors. But the competency of these to teach follows from the fact that they can teach only in union with the church; that she authorizes their teaching, and is ever present to correct them if they err, and that they are even externally commissioned by our Lord himself to teach what he has revealed. A mere external commission, which we know historically was given to the apostles and their successors, would not of itself give the capacity to teach or ensure infallibility in teaching; but he who has all power in heaven and in earth, who is God as well as man, and is himself "the way, the truth, and the life," assuredly would not, and could not, without belying his essential and immutable nature, issue a commission to teach and command all nations to hear and obey them as himself, without taking care that they should have the ability to teach his word and to teach it infallibly. That he does this is pledged in the very issue and in the words of the commission itself: "All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations; baptizing 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 consummation of the world." (St. Matt xxviii. 18-20.)
This external commission is all that needs to be proved by external evidence to the world outside of the church, and there is no more intrinsic difficulty in proving it than there is in proving the commission of George Washington as general of the American army in the Revolution, of Lord Raglan as commander-in-chief to the day of his death of the British forces employed in the Crimean war, or any other historical fact whatever. The unbroken existence of the church founded by the apostles from their day to ours, and the uniform testimony she has universally and uninterruptedly borne to the fact, would suffice to prove it, even had we no other proofs or evidence. The church, without citing her in her supernatural character, and taking her simply as an historical witness, is all that is needed, for she is a standing monument of the fact. In her corporate capacity she spans the whole distance of time from the apostles, and at each intervening moment she has been a present witness of the fact, testifying to what was present before her. The church as a corporation, without any appeal to her mystic character, has not been subject to any succession of time, has known no lapse of years, and is as present today to the events of the apostolic times as she was when those events occurred. She is at any moment we choose their contemporary, and, as a contemporary witness to extraordinary facts, her testimony is as good for us as was that of the apostles themselves to their personal contemporaries. Indeed, it is literally and truly the same, for her corporate existence from the time of the apostles to ours, or her historical identity, is unquestionable.
We are not now citing the continuous existence of the church for anything but the simple external fact of the external commission given by our Lord himself to his apostles. To that fact, whatever you think of her, she is a competent witness, and, having constantly testified to it from that day to this, her testimony is conclusive. Assume, then, the fact of the external commission, to which we who are Catholics need no external testimony, since we find the highest of all possible testimony in the internal life of the church, all the rest follows of itself. What the church believes, and teaches through her pastors and doctors, or what they in unison with her and her faith teach as the revelation of God committed to her, is his revelation, and we believe it because we believe him. Then we believe she is what she professes to be, the living body of our Lord, who lives in her and is her life, and through whom the Holy Ghost carries on the work of regeneration and glorification of all souls that do not resist him, but by his assistance coöperate with him.