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The Constitution of the Church

Art. I__ The Church is founded on Peter--is an organism,

living its own life from within, not an aggregation, or a

simple organization deriving its life from its members.

MR. GLADSTONE has added a new word to the English

language, Vaticanism, but it may not, after all, prove a per-

manent addition, for it meets no Catholic want, and serves

only a temporary want of Protestant polemics. Yet the

Vatican, with all deference to his Eminence, the Cardinal

Archbishop of Westminster, has introduced on very important

innovation, not in doctrine indeed, but in the mode of presenting

it. The Holy Council of the Vatican is, we believe, the first

(Ecumenical Council that has treated the Primacy of Peter

as the first part of De Ecclesia, or the foundation before

treating the body of the edifice. All previous councils, and

all the theologians we are acquainted with, had treated the

Primacy as the second party of the tract, De Ecclesia. Thomists,

Augustinians, Jesuits, Gallicans, Ultramontanes, the highest-

toned papists, as well as the lowest-toned, those who recog-

nized the Primacy at all, had uniformly treated the body of

the Church before treating its head. Even the theologians

designated to prepare the "Schema de Ecclesia" for the con-

sideration of the council, undoubted papists and infallibilists

as they were, did the same.

This persistence in what has always struck us as an un-

scientific method, cannot easily be explained otherwise than

by the reluctance of any theologian to assume, on his own

responsibility, to deviate from it, or the tenacity with which

the Catholic mind adheres to established usage; and it is no

slight proof of the presence and controlling influence of the

Holy Ghost in the council, that the Fathers were able to change

the method of treating this article of the faith against the

uniform practice of councils and theologians, and to adopt what

is really the scientific method of treatment. Undoubtedly, the

need of defining the powers and prerogatives of the Primacy,

before they would be compelled to suspend their sessions, or

to separate, perhaps never to assemble again in this world,

was the occasion used by the Holy Ghost to induce them to

adopt the innovation, and treat the Head before proceeding

to treat the body.

This seems at first sight a small matter, but it is in our judg-

ment important; and the change is in some measure necessary

to guard against the error that the Church can exist as the

Church of Christ without the pope: which we hold to be

impossible. The Church is founded on Peter, and without

Peter it has no foundation. A church without a foundation

is founded on nothing and is nothing-- a castle in the air.

Till you have Peter, you have no church. We cannot

understand, therefore, how we can treat scientifically the

Church before treating the Primacy, without which there is no

Church. We beg here to introduce a brief disquisition on the

Constitution of the Church, written before we removed from

Boston in 1855, though not published till January, 1856.

We omit the portion of the essay written after our removal

to this city, when the REVIEW in a measure changed its

character, and sought to cooperate with those of our friends

who made it their specialty to labor directly for the conversion

of non-Catholic Americans. There was something generous

and patriotic, and yet more of enthusiasm in the movement

which the REVIEW sought to aid, but it came to nothing, and

the REVIEW caused its own ruin. It went so far at last, that

many of its early friends hardly recognized it as Catholic,

and non-Catholics began to look for our return to their ranks,

as if they had anything to offer us that we had not sufficiently

tried before our conversion.

Yet, however we may have been misled by a mistaken

policy, against which we inwardly revolted, we held fast,

through the grace of God, to our faith, and held, as we still

hold, the Church to be essentially papal in her constitution.

We do not view with indifference the conversion of our non-

Catholic countrymen, in whose conversion and incorporation

into the Catholic body is the only hope, not only of their

salvation, but of our civil society, becoming most fearfully

corrupt, indeed, rotten to the core. But to their conversion

there are many obstacles which, in the ordinary course of

Divine Providence, can be only slowly overcome, and with

great labor and difficulty, prayer and self-sacrifice, which

surpass the zeal and charity of the mass even of our Catholic

population, who have hardly learned as yet that this is their

country. We can, as laymen, only pray for their conversion,

and, as far as we are permitted, present them Catholic

truth in its integrity. The article from which we make our

extracts was written a propos of a work on Church authority

by the eminent convert, the late Rev. Robert I. Wilberforce.

"ART. I__ An Inquiry into the Principles of Church Author-

ity; or, Reasons for recalling my Subscription to the Royal

Supremacy. By the Rev. R. I. WILBERFORCE, M.A.

Baltimore: Hedian & O'Brien, 1855. 12mo, pp.333.

THE Church is not, as many suppose, a mere aggregation

or association of individuals or congregations; she is an

organism, living and operating from her own central life,

derived from the indwelling Holy Ghost; and it is the failure

of non-Catholics to recognize and appreciate this fact, that

renders it so difficult for us to make them understand the

importance of the unity of the Church, and the destructive

nature of heresy and schism. The world outside the Church

has lost, or never had, the true conception of unity in multi-

plicity, and seems unable to comprehend how that what is

multiple can also be one, or how that what is one can also

be multiple. All modern philosophy, if pushed to its last

consequences, is either Atheistic or Pantheistic, and loses

either unity on the one hand, or multiplicity on the other.

In Germany, the tendency to Pantheism predominates, and

multiplicity is sacrificed to unity. The universe is identified

with its Maker, and the reality of second causes is denied.

In Great Britain and our own country, the prevailing

tendency is to Atheism. The British and American mind

loses the conception of unity, or confounds it with the con-

ception of totality, or the aggregate. The God it asserts, is

not the living God, but an induction from particulars, the

last generalization of observable phenomena. With it, multi-

plicity precedes unity, and the universe is prior to its Creator.

Its unity is the sum total, composite in its nature, therefore

divisible, and therefore no true unity at all. Hence English

and American non-Catholics fail to conceive the substantial

unity of the Church, and regard her as formed or constituted

by an aggregation or association of individuals and particular

congregations. They place the members before the body,

make the branches older than the trunk, and assume that

the branches bear the vine, not the vine the branches. The

individual believer, on their theory, precedes the Church,

and imparts his life to her, so that she derives her life from

Christ through believers, instead of believers deriving theirs

from Christ through her.

"This is the common Protestant doctrine, and is the only

doctrine on which they can protest against the Church, and

yet claim to be in union with Christ. Protestants make no

account of the unity of the Church, and really assign her no

essential office in the salvation of souls. They see no grave

evil in heresy and schism, and do not understand why it is

that salvation is not attainable out of the communion of the

Church as well as in it. Even some Catholics, more or less

affected by the Atheistic philosophy of the age and country,

and but imperfectly understanding the constitution of the

Church, find themselves in some measure unable to perceive

the reason of justice of the dogma of exclusive salvation.

They accept the dogma, because it is a dogma of the Church,

and they know that, to be Catholics, they must believe what-

ever she believes and teaches; but they do not well under-

stand why it need be so; and they see no intrinsic reason why

there should be any harm in admitting that a man who walks

by such light as he has, and is sincere in his belief, can be

saved out of the Catholic communion as well as in it. Indeed,

we even find not a few Catholics who in reality feel that the

dogma is harsh, and hardly reconcilable with the justice of

God, and who do their best to soften and explain it away.

Hence, the frequent admonitions of our Holy Father, Pius

the Ninth, to the pastors of the Church, to insist, in their

instructions to the faithful, on the absolute necessity of the

Catholic faith to salvation, and on the dogma that there is

no salvation out of the Church.

"This difficulty results from not well understanding that

the Church is not simply an aggregation, deriving her being

and life from the individuals aggregated, but an organism,

living her own divine life from her own centre, and imparting

life to her members. The life flows, not from the members

to her, but from her to them. This is what our indifferentists

and latitudinarians do not sufficiently consider, At the

bottom of their thought there lies the error, that the Christian

precedes and makes the Church, or imparts to her the

Christian life. This is undeniably the case with nearly all

Protestants in our day. It is with them not the Church that

brings forth believers, but the believers that bring forth the

Church. Especially is this true of the so-called Evangelical

sects, who deny baptismal regeneration, and yet assert the

necessity of being born again. Individuals come to the

Church, not to be regenerated and to enter upon the super-

natural Christian life, but they come to her because they

are, or fancy they are, regenerated. The Christian life, they

hold, may, and indeed must, be begotten in us before approach-

ing the Church, or else we are not fit to approach her.

Hence very few Protestants hold union with the Church at

all necessary to union with God, or to final salvation.

Hence there is and can be nothing fatal in schism, or in

separation from her communion. For, if the life may be

begotten and lived independently of union with the Church,

it is clear, since it is the life that saves, that to be in her com-

munion cannot be essential to salvation. But, if our Protest-

ant friends understood that the life flows from the Holy

Ghost only through the Church, and that, as St. Cyprian

says, he cannot have God for his father who has not the

Church for his mother, they would see at once the schismatic

from the very source and conditions of spiritual life.

"The error is occasioned by overlooking or not considering

the fact, that the Church is an organism that lives a life of

her own, from her centre, and assimilates to herself

individuals and congregations by a law analogous to that by

which the body assimilates the food which is eaten, and

converts it into living flesh. The Church, in the spiritual

order, is what humanity is in the natural order. She is in

fact regenerated humanity, living the life of grace, as

unregenerated humanity lives merely the life of nature. Or

we may say, she is the new creation, holding from God as

author of grace, as the primitive creation, or natural order,

holds from him as author of nature. The two creations are

analogous, and each, so to speak, has its type in the other.

Grace corresponds to nature, and nature corresponds to grace.

The conditions of life in the order of grace must be, to

some extent at least, analogous to the conditions of life in the

order of nature, for the earthly is made after the pattern of

the heavenly, and mirrors, reflects, or imitates it. In the

primitive creation, in the natural order, the individual can

be born and live only by communion with God through

natural humanity; so in the new creation he can be born,

or regenerated, and live only by communion with God

through regenerated humanity. The conditions of birth in

the new creation, if birth at all, must be analogous, as far as

spiritual things can be analogous to natural things, to the con-

ditions of birth in the primitive creation: and hence St. Paul

teaches that the relation of husband and wife, in the sacrament

of marriage, is a figure of the relation of Christ and the

Church. The Church is called the bride, the spouse of Christ,

and is the mother of his children, the joyful mother of all the

faithful. If there is any propriety or aptness in the figure,

the Church performs the maternal office in the spiritual con-

ception and birth of the believer. The believer is begotten

by the Holy Ghost, and born of her, and nourished at her

breast, and we always call her our mother, and love and

honor her as such. The Church can, then, no more derive

her life from the faithful, than in the natural order the mother

can derive her natural life from her children. As the mother

precedes the birth of her child, so must the Church precede

the birth of the believer.

"If it be asked, since the Church in one sense is the con-

gregation of the faithful, Where was the Church, or what

was the Church organism prior to the gathering of believers?

we might answer by asking, Where or what was the natural

humanity prior to individual men and women? If humanity

is inconceivable without individuals, individuals are equally

inconceivable without humanity. But we will not insist on

this answer. The Church derives from Christ, through the

Incarnation, typified in the fact that Eve was taken from

the side of Adam, and formed from him, bone of his bone

and flesh of his flesh. Regarded as prior to the visible con-

gregation of believers, the Church was in the Blessed Virgin,

from whom our Lord assumed his flesh. Hence the Blessed

Virgin, a mother and yet a virgin, is termed the Mother of

God, and the Spouse of the Holy Ghost. She is the second

Eve, as Christ is the second Adam; the mother, as he is the

father, of regenerated humanity. In a certain sense, we

may even say that she is the Church, and hence the saints

apply to her those texts and epithets which they apply to

the Church herself. She is, in more than a figurative sense,

our spiritual mother. She is the mother of grace, through

whom flows the Christian life, and through whom we receive

from God his gifts and graces. As the mother of our

Redeemer, she is intimately connected with the work of our

redemption, and participates in our regeneration. Hence

the reasonableness and justice of that high honor and deep

veneration which we Catholics render her, the filial love we

bear her, and the prominent place she holds in our devotions,

so scandalous to no-Church Protestants, and which they

foolishly, not to say blasphemously, affect to brand as

'Mariolatry.' Poor men! How little do they understand

of the mystery of the Incarnation, and of the part of Our

Lady, through the grace and election of God, in the concep-

tion, birth, and progress of the Christian life!

"Now, if there be any truth in the view we take, and

which is certainly scriptural, the Church is the maternal

source of life to the believer, and as such must be herself a

living unity, living her own central life from the indwelling

Holy Ghost, supernaturally immanent in her as the new

creation, as God is, so to speak, naturally immanent-as

causa efficiens-- in the primitive creation, and imparting life

to the faithful instead of receiving it from them. Hence it

follows that to break the unity of the Church would be to

destroy her, and to be separated from her communion would

be spiritual death, because separated from the source and

current of spiritual life. Hence the fatal nature of schism,

and the terrible consequences of excommunication. Each

implies the spiritual death of the soul, and even its eternal

death, as much as separation from humanity implies our

natural death; not as a mere penalty arbitrarily annexed,

but as a natural and necessary consequence, because it places

its subject out of all communication with God in the new

creation or supernatural order, and cuts him off from the

very source and current of supernatural life.

"All life springs from unity, which is always logically

prior to multiplicity. The universe originates in the creative

act of unity, and returns to unity as its final cause. If we

suppose the Church to have life at all, to be a living and

not a dead Church, we must, if we have a grain of philo-

sophy, regard her as an organism, and, therefore, regard her

unity as essential to her very being and existence. All life

not only proceeds from unity, but is love. Hatred is death,

for it separates, disunites. Life is love, and love is life.

We have our being in God; in him we live and move and

are; and God, the Sacred Scriptures tell us, is love. The

nature of all love in creatures is, as the saints maintain, to

unify, to become one with its object. The essence of the

Christian life, all agree, is love, charity; and its nature is

to unite all who live it with one another and with God. It

tends always to unity. But this it could not do if it did not

spring from unity, for there cannot be unity in the effect

without unity in the cause,-- unity in the final cause, with-

out unity in the first cause. There is, then, nothing

arbitrary or contrary to the general law of Divine Provi-

dence in making union with the Church a necessary condi-

tion of spiritual life, or in making separation from her

communion spiritual death. Having instituted his Church

as the material source of Christian life, it would be repug-

nant to his own Divine Being, Which is love, to save out of

her communion, since this would be to treat hatred as if it

were love, death as if it were life, or to repute life where no

life is.

"The Church, though, like all living organisms, invisible

as to the principle of her life, is an outward visible body.

The doctors distinguish, indeed, between the soul of the

Church and the body, as in man we distinguish between the

body and soul; but the invisible and the visible do not

constitute two distinct organisms, any more than the body

and soul in man constitute two distinct persons. Man,

though composed of soul and body, is one man, in whom

there is a union of the spiritual and material natures in one

person. The Church derives, as we have said, from the

Incarnation, and includes both the divine and the human,

and is, as it were, an extension of the Incarnation. Yet, it

includes the human as it is, not as soul alone, but as soul

and body; and as the soul is the forma corporis, she can be

no living Church without the union of body and soul. As

we can commune with the soul in man only through the

body, so in the Church we can commune with the soul,

the anima ecclesie, only through her body, -- with the

invisible, only through the visible Church; for though the

body may bear things which do not pertain to the soul, the

soul and body constitute simply one Church and are insep-

arable: otherwise the Church would be subject to dissolution,

and might fail, as we know she cannot.

"The unity of the Church as invisible demands her unity

as visible, the unity of the soul requires the unity of the body;

for we cannot conceive the soul as the forma of several

distinct and separate bodies, or regard the Church as a

monster. If the Church is indissolubly soul and body, visible

and invisible, and if she be the maternal source of Christian

life, which is love and springs from and tends to unity, she

must represent in her visible organization the invisible unity,

and be alike one in body and soul. All agree that the Church

is catholic; but if catholic, she must be one, for what is not

one cannot be catholic. Multiplicity is as repugnant to

catholicity as to unity. There can be no composite catholic-

ity. To attempt to get at the conception of catholicity by

the indefinite aggregation of particulars, is as absurd as

to attempt to reach the infinite by the indefinite aggregation

of measurable quantities; or eternity, by the indefinite aggre-

gation of moments. The larger the number aggregated, the

further are we removed from catholicity, or the universal,

for the more limited, relatively at least, is each particular.

Hence the Church, if Catholic, as all who profess the Apostles'

Creed acknowledge, must be one. Her catholicity asserts

necessarily her unity, and her visible catholicity her visible

unity. She is then a visible as well as an invisible organism.

"This established, the reason becomes evident why the

constitution of the Church is Papal, not simply Presbyterian

or Episcopal, and why the Church of Rome must be regarded

as the Mother or Mistress of all the Churches. The Church

as visible must have a visible centre of unity, a central

visible life from which everything in the visible order takes

its rise. But without the pope and the Roman See, made one

in spiritual marriage, this visible centre, this visible central

life, is not conceivable. Without the Papal Constitution, there

would be nothing in the visible order to represent the invisible

unity: which would be tantamount to saying that there is

not visible Church at all. But this again would, on the

principles we have established, be saying that there is for

us no medium of access to the invisible Church, and there-

fore there is and can be no spiritual regeneration, or new

birth. We should be as to the spiritual life, practically,

as if Christ had not been incarnated, and there were no

Church.

"It follows from this that the Papacy is fundamental, essen-

tial to the very conception of the Church in the visible order;

and, without it, the visible Church could neither be nor be

conceived. We think highly of Mr. Wilberforce, but we do

not find this thought in his otherwise most admirable treatise.

It may not have entered into his plan to recognize and

develop it, but he seems not to have entertained it, at least

in the full sense in which we wish it to be taken. He seems

to start from the life of the believer, and speaks of the

Church as a 'confederacy of Churches.' He recognizes

the Papacy, but would seem to regard it rather as secondary

than primary, as a product of the collective life of the

Church, than as the original and central unity in which the

whole ecclesiastical organization takes its rise. He may

not have intended all this, and it may be that this is only a

method he has adopted in addressing his Anglican readers,

in order to render his views the more intelligible to them, and

his arguments the more convincing to their understandings.

Such, in fact, we suppose to be the case, for we are far from

entertaining any distrust of the theological soundness of the

illustrious convert, for whom we have the kindest feelings

and the highest respect. But, taking this view absolutely,

without reference to the author, we cannot accept it; be-

cause it makes the child precede the parent, and supposes

unity may be evolved from multiplicity, which is metaphysi-

cally impossible. Unity is before multiplicity, creates it,

and is never created by it. The parent precedes the child;

the priest, as spiritual father, precedes the simple believer,

and the pope precedes the bishop, and is not only the com-

plement but the foundation of the hierarchy, the basis as

well as the summit of the ecclesiastical organization.

'Thou are Peter,' said our Lord, 'and upon this rock will

I build my church,' and therefore St. Ambrose may well

say, Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia: Where Peter is, there is the

Church. Prior to Peter is Christ incarnate and his blessed

Mother, and nothing else, in our conception of the Church.

As Christ is prior to Peter, so is Peter prior to the congre-

gation of the faithful under the new law. The pope holds,

as successor of Peter, immediately from Christ, in whom is

the original priesthood, and all teaching and governing author-

ity. He is not evolved from the internal operations of the

Church, nor created or commissioned by the Episcopacy,

but is the central unity whence the whole hierarchy takes

its rise. He is the Vicar of Christ, and represents him in

the visible order, and is, in regard to the visible, in the

place of Christ himself. Christ may use bishops, priests, or

the faithful in designating or electing the successsor of Peter,

as he may use the people as his instrument of constituting

the state and carrying on the affairs of civil government; but

the pope holds his commission immediately from the invisible

head of the Church, not from them. It is not the see that

makes the bishop, for the see is not strictly a see without the

bishop. The see is the bride, the spouse of the bishop, and

he wears a ring symbolical of his marriage with his see.

But there is no bride without a bridegroom, no wife without

a husband, and St. Paul tells us the woman was not first,

but the man: which our Women's-Rights people, whose

doctrine is a legitimate deduction form Protestant principles,

are apt to forget. Rome did not make Peter pope, but

Peter made Rome the Apostolic See, which, without him to

create it,it never could have been; and without Peter in the

Apostolic See, there could have been no other see. The

pope is Peter, Peter still living; therefore without the pope

there could have been no see, and if no see, then, again, no

bishop. As in the invisible order all originates in Christ in-

carnate, so in the visible order all originates in the Pope

married to the Holy See. We call the successor of Peter

father. The very word pope, papa, means father, and we

are not to suppose that this term has been applied to him

without a reason, or a good and sufficient reason. The term

must have some appropriateness, and imply that he is really,

in the visible order, the spiritual father of the faithful. Then

we must regard him as primary, as before all else in that

order. Without so regarding him, we should have to change

the language of all Christendom; we could discover no

analogy or correspondence between the visible and the

invisible, no aptness in the figures and illustrations used by

the Scriptures and spiritual writers, and could not even con-

ceive the unity or the catholicity of the visible Church.

"The Anglican theory, which, under some points of view,

Mr. Wilberforce so ably and philosophically refutes, stands

directly opposed to this view of the constitution of the

Church. The Anglican sometimes, when in good-humor,

is not unwilling to cede the bishop of Rome a certain primacy

which he calls a primacy of order, as distinguished from a

primacy or jurisdiction; but he stoutly denies that the Papacy

is integral in the constitution of the Church, or essential to

her existence. He supposes the Church to be prior to the

Papacy, that she can exist and perform all her essential

functions as the Church of God, without the pope. Having

got angry with the pope in the sixteenth century, he rejected

him, and now finds himself unable to assert either the unity

or the catholicity of the Church. The only Church he can

now conceive is an aggregation of believers or of particular

congregations. The faithful must precede the hierarchy, and

the Episcopacy hold from the laity. Rejecting the Papacy,

but still retaining the Episcopacy, he is obliged to fall back

upon the absurd theory, openly avowed by some Anglicans,

of diocesan Churches, and to maintain that each diocese is

independent, a Church in all its integrity, complete in itself,

and having need of nothing out of itself: substantially the

theory maintained by the Independents. But who creates

and circumscribes the diocese? who institutes or installs the

diocesan? The lay authority, is the only answer the Angli-

can can give, and consequently he must maintain that the

bishop holds his appointment, his mission, from the lay society;

or that each bishop, in what happens to be his diocese, is a self-

constituted pope, not called of God, as was Aaron, but tak-

ing his ministry upon himself, and running without being

sent. He can have, on this theory, no legitimate ecclesias-

tical authority, no unity, no catholicity; for these dioce-

san Churches are not subordinated to one and the same

ecclesiastical regimen, and have with one another, at best,

only relations of comity and friendly correspondence.

"This diocesan theory has grown out of the erroneous

notion, which obtained in England even prior to the so-called

Reformation, that the Papacy is not essential to the being of

the Church. The tendency of the secular courts, courtiers,

and jurisconsults, from Frederic, the Second of Germany

and Philip the Fair of France down to our times, has been

to regard the Church as Episcopal rather than Papal, and

the Papacy as accidental rather than essential in her con-

stitution. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the

secular authorities, emperors, kings, and princes, though

nominally Catholic, forgetful of the subordination of the

temporal to the spiritual, wielding the physical force, and

having at their disposition the chief temporal advantages,

gained an undue ascendency in ecclesiastical matters, and,

unhappily, over the minds of not a few churchmen. We

need not be surprised, therefore, to find large numbers

misapprehending the constitution of the Church, and imagin-

ing that she might exist, and be a true Church, without the

Papal authority. It was the prevalence of this notion that

prepared the way, and accounts for the sudden rise and rapid

spread of Protestantism in the early part of the sixteenth

century. No doubt, among the coadjutors of Luther there

were men who rejected the Church herself, and did not even

believe in Christ; but the larger part of who joined or submit-

ted to the Protestant movement, wished to retain the Church

and the Christian faith, and never would have become

Protestants, if they had believed it impossible to throw off

the authority of the pope without throwing off that of Christ.

Especially was this true in England; and we have no doubt

that a very considerable number of the English people verily

persuaded themselves, or were persuaded by the royalists

and anti-papists, that the schism, commenced by Henry and

completed by his daughter Elizabeth, was in reality no schism

at all, but a simple reformation of abuses, which time and

the ambition of popes had accumulated, and the restora-

tion of the Church to her primitive purity and simplicity.

Even to-day we find Anglicans who apparently maintain

this in good faith, and who really persuade themselves that

they are members of the One Holy Catholic Church and in

union with Christ.

"We see here the grave importance of having the people

not only rightly, but thoroughly instructed as to the essential

nature and constitution of the Church. We are not ignorant

of the corruptions of the human heart, or of the rebellious

nature of passion; but we cannot help thinking that if the

people had better understood the great fact that the Church

is essentially Papal, the world would never have been afflicted

with the Protestant Reformation. In the later Middle Ages,

a strong antipapal spirit extensively obtained, and, owing

to the ascendency of the secular order, everywhere encroach-

ing on the rights and prerogatives of the spiritual, the people

or the laity were inadequately instructed as to the real posi-

tion of the Papacy in the gracious economy of Divine

Providence. They knew that they were required to obey

the pope as visible head of the Church, but they did not

fully understand the strict truth of the maxim: Where Peter

is, there is the Church. Before Luther brought the discus-

sion of theological questions before the public, and appealed

from the schools, and even the Church herself, too the laity,

the people had comparatively little understanding of them.

They had ordinarily the simplicity of faith, which suffices for

salvation, but very little knowledge of its reasons and rela-

tions. This answered every purpose when the civil author-

ities were submissive to the Holy Father, and performed

their duty as protectors of the Church; but when these

authorities made war on the pope himself, when they wished

to revive the Caesarism of pagan Rome, and make the chief

of the state at once Imperator and Summus Pontifex, the laity

were, save when animated by a lively faith and an ardent

piety, ill prepared to stand by the pope, and to offer them a

vigorous and manly resistance. Their defective understand-

ing of the essential constitution of the Church laid them

open to the arts and subtitles of the evil-minded, and ren-

dered it comparatively easy to impose upon their simplicity,

and to detach them from their fidelity. The difficulty did

not lie altogether with the simple peasantry; it lay in the

defective understanding of the constitution of the Church

by the lay society generally. Dating from Frederic the

Second of Germany, the lay society was, speaking in

general terms, antipapal, and held the doctrine of which

the Anglican theory is but a logical and historical develop-

ment. We think this was in a great measure owing to

the little real theological instruction imparted to this

society. More full or more accurate theological instruction

to the laity,-- the state of society in those ages considered,--

however desirable it might have been, was, most likely,

impracticable; and we must not regard it as a fault of

the Church, or of those churchmen who were animated

with her spirit, and conformed to her wishes, that it was

not given.

"The Church is obliged to take the world as she finds it,

and to do the best she can with it under the circumstances,

and with the materials it furnishes to her hand. She her-

self always wishes her children not only to know the simple

dogmas of faith, but to understand well all that pertains to

sound doctrine. She has no great fondness for what our

friends of The Rambler call 'The system of safeguards.'

She does not count temptations and trials an evil, and never

seeks to protect the faithful by keeping them in ignorance.

She does not teach them that, in order to preserve their virtue,

they must retire from the world, but labors always by her

instructions and sacraments to prepare them to live in the

world without being of it, or contaminated with its errors

and vices:--'I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of

the world, but that thou shouldst keep from evil.'

The system, which she is supposed to approve, of keeping

people in the faith by excluding all knowledge of what is

opposed to it, by repressing thought, and insisting on blind

obedience, is not her system; and if, as is alleged, it is

sometimes countenanced in Catholic countries, we must

attribute it not to her, but to the secular order which obtains

in them, in spite of all she is able to do. All absolute civil

governments, all despotisms and despots, are jealous of

freedom of thought, and especially freedom of education.

Even in our own country, we find a large party wedded,

without knowing it, to social despotism, that are doing their

best to destroy freedom of education. They are laboring to

place education under the exclusive control of the state, and

to prohibit all instruction and all methods of instruction not

sanctioned by the civil authorities. The church has always

had more or less of civil despotism to struggle with, for

though she found it comparatively easy to convert individ-

uals, she has never succeeded in any nation in fully

converting society and the civil order. The safeguard

system originates not in the Church, but in unconverted

society; in a state which, while professing the Catholic faith,

remains pagan as to its principles and modes of action; and

it accords far better with the narrow jealousies and short-

sighted views of the civil despot, than with the free, open,

ingenuous, and trustful spirit of Catholicity. The Church

loves the light, for she is from above, not from below; she

fosters intelligence; she promotes education, and provides it

wherever the state leaves her free to do so; she labors to

have all her children well and thoroughly instructed in all

that pertains to spiritual, moral, political, and social life, and

wishes everywhere a free, manly, and enlightened laity.

She demands in them, it is true, the docility of the child,

but in understanding she demands that they be no longer

children, but men,--strong, energetic men, in whom intelli-

gence is not repressed or enfeebled, but rectified, elevated,

and invigorated by the infused habits of grace.

"Whatever may be said in regard to the ages immediately

preceding the Protestant outbreak, this much is certain: the

Church wishes her children to be thoroughly instructed, and

the fullest and most exact theological instruction practicable

is now a necessity, and the faithful must have it. Never,

since the times of the persecuting pagan emperors, has the

Church had less than now to hope from kings and queens,

as nursing fathers and nursing mothers; and never has she

been more completely thrown back upon her own resources, as

a spiritual kingdom set up by our Lord on the earth. Never,

since she emerged from the catacombs and planted the Cross

on the Capital of the world, have her children been more

mixed up in the commerce of the world with the enemies of

their religion, or more exposed to the fatal influences of error

and indifferency. Simplicity of faith is now nowhere enough;

we must have the knowledge of understanding. It is not

enough to know the chief dogmas of our faith, and the or-

dinary practical duties of our state in life. It is necessary

to know the dogmas, and their relation to the practical duties,

to one another, and to natural reason. It is not enough

now that this knowledge, formerly imparted in the schools to

theological students, be possessed by the clergy alone. In

these days of insubordination and self-will, when it is so

difficult to secure proper respect to pastors and teachers, it

must be possessed in as great a degree as practicable by the

laity also. Not otherwise shall we be able to meet the wants

of our times, bring back a docile and obedient spirit, and

guard the faithful against the dangers to their faith and piety

multiplied by common schools, journals, and popular

literature. The laity, in all outside the sacraments, are now

in great measure thrown upon themselves; and their safety,

aside from the sacraments, depends to a great extent on

their understanding of their faith and its reasons and rela-

tions, and in being able at all times to defend it intelligently

and manfully.

"There may be those who regret the change that has taken

place, and feel that we have fallen upon evil times. We

confess that we are not of their number. We think the

Church will gain more than she will lose by the change, for

always does she lose more than she gains from the protection

of princes. Princes, with a few exceptions, have always made

her pay dear for their favor, and enslaved as much as they

have protected her. We think, upon the whole, that she

will derive great advantages from being thrown back upon

her own resources, as the kingdom of God on earth. We

must rely now on virtue, rather than on innocence; on the

knowledge of what is true, rather than on ignorance of what

is false. Innocence, regarded as a negative quality, is good.

no doubt; but virtue, which is something positive, is better.

Ignorance is favorable neither to simplicity of faith, nor to

fevor of devotion. All faith and real devotion is an affec-

tion of the rational nature, and, therefore, intrinsically

reasonable. Our religion presupposes man to be created with

a rational nature, and always addresses him as a reason-

able and reasoning being. The heart she demands is the

enlightened heart,--the union of understanding and will.

The Church can live, and move at her ease, only in an

atmosphere of intelligence, and, as far as she has her

freedom, she creates that atmosphere around her. She is

obliged, as we have said, to take the world as she finds it,

and do the best she can with it. She works with such

materials as the world furnishes her. Where the political

and social order,-- what we call civility, or the civil order,--

is adverse to her, she has to labor under a great disadvantage,

for she cannnot at once change that order, and conform it to

her own mind. She addresses men as individuals, and does

and must treat them as free agents. Where individuals are

ignorant and enslaved, and the state will not suffer them to

be enlightened and emancipated, she must take them as they

are, and deal with them for what they are; although they

are not what she wishes them, or what she would soon make

them, if suffered to address their understandings, and to

exert her silent but powerful influence on their hearts."