The Purpose of the Papacy | Page 5

thought, unite such
contradictories, such discordant elements; any more than we can reduce
the strident sounds of a multitude of cacophonous instruments to one
harmonious and beautiful melody.
And if the Catholic Church stands thus alone, again we repeat, it is
because no other has received the promise of divine support, or even
cares to recognise that such a promise was ever made. The Catholic
Church has been the only Church not only to exercise, but even to
claim the prerogative of infallibility: but she has claimed this from the
beginning. Every child born into her fold has been taught to profess and
to believe, firstly, that the Catholic Church is the sole official and
God-appointed guardian of the sacred deposit of divine truth, and,
secondly, that she, and no other, enunciates to the entire world--to all
who have ears to hear--the full revelation of Christ--_His truth_; the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth; fulfilling, to the letter, the
command of her Divine Master, "Go into the whole world, and preach
the Gospel to every creature" (Mark xvi. 15).
How has this been possible? Simply and solely because God, Who
promised that "the Spirit of Truth" (_i.e._, the Holy Ghost) "should
abide with her for ever; and should guide her in all truth" (John xiv. 16,
xvi. 12), keeps His promise. When our Lord promised to "_be with_"
the teaching Church, in the execution of the divine commission
assigned to it, "_always_" and "to the end of the world," that promise
clearly implied, and was a guarantee, first, that the teaching authority

should exist indefectibly to the end of the world; and secondly, that
throughout the whole course of its existence it should be divinely
guarded and assisted in fulfilling the commission given to it, _viz._, in
instructing the nations in "all things whatsoever Christ has
commanded," in other words, that it should be their infallible Guide
and Teacher.
Venerable Bede, speaking of the conversion of our own country by
Augustine and his monks, sent by Pope Gregory the Great, says: "And
whereas he [Pope Gregory] bore the Pontifical power over all the world,
and was placed over the Churches already reduced to the faith of truth,
he made our nation, till then given up to idols, the Church of Christ"
(_Hist. Eccl._ lib. ii. c. 1). If we will but listen to the Pope now, he will
make it once again "the Church of Christ," instead of the Church of the
"Reformation," and a true living branch, drawing its life from the one
vine, instead of a detached and fallen branch, with heresy, like some
deadly decay, eating into its very vitals.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: No Pope, no matter what may have been his private
conduct, ever promulgated a decree against the purity of faith and
morals.]


CHAPTER II.
THE POPE'S GREAT PREROGATIVE.
The clear and certain recognition of a great truth is seldom the work of
a day. We often possess it in a confused and hidden way, before we can
detect, to a nicety, its exact nature and limitations. It takes time to
declare itself with precision, and, like a plant in its rudimentary stages,
it may sometimes be mistaken for what it is not--though, once it has
reached maturity, we can mistake it no longer. As Cardinal Newman

observes: "An idea grows in the mind by remaining there; it becomes
familiar and distinct, and is viewed in its relations; it leads to other
aspects, and these again to others.... Such intellectual processes as are
carried on silently and spontaneously in the mind of a party or school,
of necessity come to light at a later date, and are recognised, and their
issues are scientifically arranged." Consequently, though dogma is
unchangeable as truth is unchangeable, this immutability does not
exclude progress. In the Church, such progress is nothing else than the
development of the principles laid down in the beginning by Jesus
Christ Himself. Thus--to take a simple illustration--in three different
councils, the Church has declared and proposed three different articles
of Faith, _viz._, that in Jesus Christ there are (1) two natures, (2) two
wills, and (3) one only Person. These may seem to some, who cannot
look beneath the surface, to be three entirely new doctrines; to be, in
fact, "additions to the creed". In sober truth, they are but expansions of
the original doctrine which, in its primitive and revealed form, has been
known and taught at all times, that is to say, the doctrine that Christ is,
at once, true God and true Man. That one statement really contains the
other three; the other three merely give us a fuller and a completer
grasp of the original one, but tell us nothing absolutely new.
In a similar manner, and by a similar