ROMAN CATHOLICISM 285 



world can one discover a similar phenomenon. And as it is 

 to-day, so it was yesterday and throughout the centuries. 



Those who have left the Church have always cast off some- 

 thing, either of doctrine or of government. They have failed, 

 either in unity or organization, or in unity of doctrine and 

 teaching. But all through the pages of history, back to fhe 

 beginnings of the Church, the note of unity sounds through 

 the ages as the leit motif of the Catholic Church, and of the 

 Catholic Church alone. In the Mass, the priest, since the 

 first ages of the Church, has always prayed : "Thy holy 

 Catholic Church, which do Thou vouchsafe to pacify, guard, 

 unite and govern throughout the whole world," and that 

 prayer goes up unceasingly every day from her altars in 

 every land. No other religion of ancient or modern times, 

 pagan, monotheistic (except, perhaps, the venerable Jewish 

 Church, when its priesthood and ahar existed), or Christian, 

 has or ever had that mark of unity. They have not tried to 

 live up to "One body, one spirit, one Lord, one faith, one 

 baptism." Even now, in our own day, when most of us are 

 tolerant of one another, denominations professing the same 

 identical faith fail to get together in corporate union, while 

 those that have but a hair's breadth between them stand rig- 

 idly aloof. In no other Christian assembly at any time in 

 the pages of history has there ever been such a wide diversity 

 of peoples, races, divergent political views and national jeal- 

 ousies and antipathies among the inhabitants of the earth so 

 welded together and so knit into one as the Catholic Church 

 exhibits. It alone, among all the Christian faiths, is truly 

 Catholic — truly universal — spread world-wide in every land 

 and among every people, no matter how antagonistic they 

 be one to another; and it alone is one in the faith which it 

 teaches and in the government which it obeys in spiritual 

 things. 



Nor does its Catholicity and unity stop here. Its faith 

 teaches that the Church, the Spouse of Christ, is one now and 

 hereafter. It reaches from this world to the next; and the 

 Church Triumphant, in the splendid vision and glorious com- 

 munion with the Triune God, the Church Suffering at the door 

 of beatific rest and eternal light awaiting entrance into the 

 fullness of the vision and glory of God, and the Church visi- 

 ble and Militant battling here with sin on earth, is all one — 



