one truth or one aspect of truth, and draws its strength from the concentrated effort that this makes possible. But the Catholic Church cannot insist on any one truth because it has all truth as its trust. But Catholicity stands more firmly in the long run. It will lose locally and temporarily while some one aspect of religion catches the public eye or falls in with the popular taste; and it will be soundly abused as out of touch with the modern mind. When metaphysical theology was in fashion the Church was roundly abused for its insistence on good works; now that good works are all the rage and men are saved by social service, the Church is abused for its insistence on metaphysical theology. But wisdom is justified of all her children. The fret of the weather rain and wind and wave constantly breaks off masses of ice from the glacier, which sail gaily out to sea and presently melt and vanish; but the glacier remains.

In a wider sense the Church is Catholic as comprising all the elect. It is the Communion of Saints. Much of our difficulty would be avoided if we would remember that. We lose heart because of the petty divisions of the Church here. We are disheartened and ashamed of our presentation of the Gospel whether among some heathen tribes or in an American village. Nothing is

more disheartening than the village with its handful of inhabitants and its dozen of "churches"all practically empty of a Sunday morning, while roads swarm with motors. But whatever these empty edifices signify they do not prove that the Church is divided. They are evidence that our understanding of the Gospel is faulty, and our attempt to present it in great measure failure; but the Church of God still remains, notwithstanding our efforts to wreck it. Our divisions are but the angry waves on the surface of the ocean, stirred by storms and capable of doing a certain amount of damage; but the great underlying depths of the ocean are undisturbed. So the central life of the Church is untouched in its union with our Lord.

I do not want to minimise the disaster of divisions; but we must be clear what the disaster is and the extent of the damage. It is disaster to certain souls; but the life of the Church is untouched in its Catholic Unity. It is the one Home of God's elect. Into the Haven behind the veil there are streaming constantly the souls who have been rescued from the trials of earth and are entered into their rest. We of the Church Militant are but a missionary station of the Catholic Church, and we stress too much our importance when we cry that the Kingdom is lost when there has been at most an affair of outposts. Let us

remember that the Catholicity of the Church is a quality of the Body of Christ; we may cut ourselves away from that body, but the body will remain and will remain Catholic.

Again because the Church is Catholic it is exclusive. We are tempted to-day to a notion of Catholicity which is merely inclusive and therefore characterless. The "great church" of modern Protestantism is an attempt to escape the plain meaning of the results of division by setting up a false ideal of a Catholic Church as a body composed of all sorts of well meaning people who have agreed to disregard their differences and play at being one. This might be possible if the Christian religion were a human discovery. If it belonged to men they might do as they liked with

It

it. But it is in fact a revelation committed to the Church to keep; the Church is its custodian and cannot act as though it were lord of it. It must, as trustee, teach truth and deny error. is tolerant, but there are necessary limits of toleration. It can tolerate the presence of intellectual sinners, as it can of any other sinners; but it has no right to tolerate their sin. There is no charity in suffering a disease-breeding center to exist because it may hurt some one's feelings to attack it; and it is not charity to let falsehood go unrebuked and misstatement uncorrected be

cause the propagators of error are well-meaning people. If any Christian body approve error it destroys, so far forth, its Christian character. I say, so far forth, because it appears that the Catholicity of the local church may be grievously injured, without being destroyed. For example, the assertion of the Roman Church as to the papacy seems not to have wholly destroyed its Catholicity. But it is inconceivable that the whole Church should ever affirm untruth; our Lord's promise must be held to deny that. If the Church could affirm error, Christianity would be reduced to a philosophy, a system of speculation rather than a system of truth.

We will note one other characteristic of Catholicity: wherever the Church is, it is wholly. "Where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there am I in the midst of them." The Catholic Church is not achieved by a sum in addition; it is not that all the "local" or "national" churches "make up" the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is a divine and heavenly fact that is manifested in this or that place; i. e., all the powers and graces of the Catholic Church are wherever it at all is.

Amid our present divisions it is felt that there is great difficulty in discovering the Catholic Church. It were an easy way out of the diffi

culty to identify some one existing body, e. g., the Orthodox or the Roman Catholic, with the Catholic Church; but the problem is not quite so simple. But if it cannot be solved in this way, how are we to solve it? If there may be error in the local attempts to express the truth whether in Constantinople or Rome or Canterbury, are we not very much at sea? Are there any practical tests of Catholicity?

There would seem to be no reason for casting aside the well known tests proposed by S. Vincent of Lerins. They have to be applied with a certain amount of common sense, as indeed S. Vincent himself applied them, and not in a wooden way; but so applied they give us, I think, the tests we want. S. Vincent says:

"In the Catholic Church itself we take great care that we hold that which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and properly 'Catholic,' as the very force and meaning of the word shows, which comprehends everything almost universally. And we shall observe this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one Faith to be true which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is plain that our ancestors and fathers proclaimed; consent if in antiquity itself we eagerly follow the defini