children, and finding herself in the midst of awakening of the truly national and Christian spirit and animation, she now strives to heal the wounds of centuries of darkness by enlightening the slaves of letter and of an alien spirit.

5. That, having by very slow, it may be, but sure steps, continued to spread the light of Christianity in the ever widening limits of the empire, not by sword or persecution, but by spiritual means of education and piety, she, in her flourishing mission to Japan, begins to extend her beneficent influence beyond those confines.

May she continue in this progress, and, by making the banner of orthodoxy shine forth afar, be the means of uniting the whole of mankind into the one flock and fold of Christ.

THE CHURCH CATHOLIC'

By B. F. C. COSTELLOE, M.A

"THROUGH all the centuries of civilization "-so I imagine Macaulay's New Zealander will say to an impartial generation-" through all the change and chance of History there runs one permanent power. Alike in the decay of Greece and the pride of Rome, alike through the tempest of the barbarian times and the gradual uprising of the kingdoms, from the ages when men accepted meekly their appointed place, to the latter day when every man's hand was against his brother in the bitter war of individual competition, one system of things has stood secure, as a castle founded upon a rock stands above the rising and the falling tide, through the calm weather and the storm.

"An organization at first but of the unlearned and the outcasts of society -as was its Founder-placed under the ban of the most imperial despotism the world has seen, it was a little later the sister sovereign of that same Empire throughout the Roman world; and when the Empire fell beneath the greatness of its task, the throne of the Fisherman continued to stand in the very palace of the Cæsars, and the city where the Popes of four centuries had been driven like things of darkness underground became the world-capital of the Papacy.

"In one age the apostle of an ideal morality in an evil time; in another the conserver of learning; in a third the mother of the Arts; in all, the pattern and helper of political and social unity-this unchanging yet evervarying kingdom, this stern and yet most liberal philosophy, not only claimed to teach, but taught, as with authority, the children of men."

Surely I may claim, my friends, that it is a startling item in the secular march of things, a masterful fact not lightly to be put by-no more than that other cardinal fact to which it leads us back-the life and death of Jesus who was called the Christ. He founded this power, He said it

should not fail; and it has not failed.

Not once, but many times, indeed, there came great waves of what the world thought disaster. In the beginning it was persecution. Edict after edict went out against them, till in the darkest of the night before the dawn an illiterate barbarian bent the force of the twin Empires to exterminate the Christian name: and knowing how easy was the detection of those who never would deny their crime, the imperial statesman said that the

1 This address has already been printed as a separate tract, by the Catholic Truth Society.

dangerous rival of the Cæsars would not be heard of any more-but it is the statesmen who are forgotten.

Then there was the wave of Schism. The Arian heresy prevailed so far that men said the Church's time was ended upon the earth. Princes and peoples, Bishops and provinces, fell away, till there was but a handful left to continue the great tradition. Yet in a little while the Arians passed like a mirage, and men asked each other the meaning of the name.

It was an even darker hour, when a rising tide of moral corruption and a swift outbreak of intellectual doubt coinciding in the period of the Renaissance seemed to have killed the energies of the Church, and swamped in wickedness and infidelity the very Court of Rome. Yet the curious reasonings of the Neo-Pagans have left but faint echoes in the history of thought-the worldly Popes and the corrupt Cardinals and all the unfaithful stewards who dared to lift their mitres up against their Master have gone to their account-and there does not remain upon the institutions or the morals or the doctrine of the Church a vestige of the evil time.

Wave upon wave, in the very worst of the danger, came the great upheaval called the Reformation, wherein the spirit of Individualism, personified in the rough violence of Luther, rent the Church in twain; and in this rebellion and the disorders which accompanied and followed it, it seemed as if the bark of Peter must assuredly go down. Yet as even Macaulay-most typical of English Protestants-has borne witness, the work of the Council of Trent and the early labours of the Jesuit Order and all that inner Reformation which accompanied these, left the Papacy not weaker but stronger than before.

Finally, in our time, are come the days when countless new chapters of revelation are unrolled by science, and when a universal criticism, laying faith and reverence aside, has summoned every creed and every law to answer at the bar of reason for its right to be. All these great and good men who are to free us from the trammels of old time-whether they come as agnostics or in the name of evolution, whether they say they hold God needless, or have found our immortality to be a phantom, or cannot recognise that there is such a thing as sin-with one accord in divers tongues cry out to us that the old creeds have passed for ever, and that the religion of the future, if religion there be at all, must be something less archaic than the Church of Christ. But in the midst of them-not denying whatever truth they have to show, adapting indeed the message of the ages to the later time, but upholding always her profession of Christ's teaching and the Christian Law-the ancient Church goes on.

It is in this permanence amid the changing centuries, it is in this enduring triumph in defeat, that even the most hostile critics have felt something of that great appeal which to her children the mere existence of the Church implies; and something of the force with which to their eyes is realized in her the prophecy of the Divine Founder. May we not well

call it a fulfilment of that commission, with which, in different wordings, it pleased the Spirit that inspired the writers of the covenant to close three Gospels and to begin the Acts: "As My Father hath sent Me, so send I you go ye therefore into all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things, whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you always, even to the end of the world"?

It is in this light, then, that I desire first to present to you the mission and office of the Catholic Church. Its name insists upon its universal claim. It is not a congregation of persons agreeing together; it is not a School of Philosophy; it is not a Mutual Improvement Society. It is not even a Church among other Churches. It is the Church Universal— the Living Voice of God, in Christ's revelation, unto all people, through all time. It is for this reason, and this only, that it teaches as its Master taught, not as the Scribes and Pharisees, but as one "having authority." It is for this reason that in God's name it makes that awful demand upon the faith of men which no human power, however arrogant, would dare suggest that we who accept its teaching office shall accept those propositions which are "of faith,” even where we do not wholly understand them, and even where they may seem to us to stand in conflict with other portions of our personal reasoning as to the things that lie within the human ken.

You will see at once that this demand cannot merely be waived aside as being incompatible with so-called rights of private judgment, unless you are prepared on the same principle to deny that there can be any authoritative revelation of God's truth at all.

Private judgment-meaning the paramount authority of that which at any moment may commend itself to me-must dissolve any Divine authority of the Written Word, as surely as of the Living Voice. Luther, in his more consistent mood, was hardly less arrogant than Mr. Matthew Arnold in his assertion that the Canon of the New Testament was to be limited by his own theology. The Epistle of James, said Luther, cannot be the Word of God, because it is tainted with "Justification by works." This and this cannot be a λóytov of Jesus, says the modern critic, because I would not have said it.

I do not forget that one great watchword of the sixteenth century revok was the appeal from the Church to the Bible. But the impartial critics have long since begun to recognise that the Bible is no ally of the Lutheran and Calvinist theology, much less of the eclectic system of the so-called National Church of England. And as the inevitable disintegration has gone on, the appeal to the Bible has come to be an appeal against the Bible.

I do not hesitate, indeed, to say that the teaching office of the Church and the existence of any real revelation must stand and fall together. It there be no Church, neither is there any Bible, unless you mean by a

If

Bible an interesting but scrappy compendium of Oriental literature. the Church be not a teacher, then there is not any Christ at all, unless it be a self-deluded Hebrew Socrates.

It will enable me to make my position clearer, if I may for a moment assume that those whom I address accept the proposition that the mission of Christ was to reveal to the whole world some knowledge of Divine things not attainable or not attained before. My position is that, if this be true, the claim of the Church to be a living voice, expounding with authority from age to age what was contained in that revelation and included in the deposit of faith, must of necessity be allowed. For if a revelation was required for the spiritual guidance of the race, it is selfevident that the truth intended to be revealed must be capable of being apprehended by all sorts and conditions of men, and in the coming ages of the world, with some reasonable security. A revelation which in its cardinal points was open to such absolute doubt, that the most honest, enlightened and spiritual men could arrive at conclusions diametrically opposed, and yet have no kind of arbiter to whom they could refer their difference, is no revelation at all. That any revelation should be useful for the world or conceivable as a providential design, three things surely are necessary: that it should be guaranteed in its inception; that it should carry a continuing certitude; and that it should be applicable to the intelligence and practical necessities of every struggling soul. It is written, indeed, that the things of God are hidden oftentimes from the wise and learned, and are revealed rather to the babes and sucklings of the world. But assuredly it cannot be true that the revelation of Christ is a thing discernible by sundry scholars and gentlemen, having leisure and much knowledge, but wholly misapprehended or not visible at all among the "little ones" of whom He always spoke so carefully,-by the crossingsweeper and the washerwoman, the labourer in the fields, the proletariat of the town. If from these, who need it most, the revelation of Christ is inevitably hidden, then God has mocked the universe. But if there be not a teaching authority and a living voice, how is the truth accessible to these?

Will you tell me they can read a Bible? I reply, that men better and more learned than they have found a thousand contradictory religions within the covers of the Sacred Books of Christianity. Even if it were not so, who shall guarantee to them either the degree of authority that attaches to these books or even the contents of the canon, if there be no continuing teacher in the world since the day when Christ last stood on Olivet, when not a line indeed of the New Testament was written?

The movers of the revolt against authority in the sixteenth century felt the difficulty dimly; but they evidently were not aware of the far-reaching scepticism which their protest logically involved. They adopted, as a working principle, the doctrine of the infallibility of Bible texts, supplemented by the conception of the "testimony of the Holy Spirit." On