of man’s life under any different form. It is the ultimate universal sense of man’s nature, the entire sphere of its perfection, the whole and only law of its final consummation. With this character however, the Church can never be content to rest in a merely partial revelation of its power among men, but is urged continually by its very nature to take actual possession of all the world, as we have already seen, both extensively and intensively. Here we have of course the idea of a process, as something involved in the very conception itself which we have in hand. As an article of faith, the catholicity of the Church expresses a present attribute in all ages; it is not drawn simply from future, as a proleptical declaration of what is to be true hereafter, though it be not true now; the whole presence of the new creation is lodged in its constitution from the start and through all centuries. But who will pretend that this has ever yet had its proper actualization in the living world? The catholic quality and force of christianity go always along with it; but innumerable hindrances are at hand to obstruct and oppose its action; and its full victory in this view accordingly, as well as in the view of its other attributes, is to be expected only hereafter. To believe in the Church as universal or catholic, it is not necessary that we should see it in full actual possession of the whole world; for when has that been the case yet, and what less would it be than the presence of the millenium in the most absolute sense? It is to believe however that the whole power by which this is to be reached is already at work in its constitution, and that its action looks and strives always towards such end, as the only result that can fairly express its necessary inward meaning and truth.
4. The catholicity of the Church, as now described, involves of course the idea also of its unity and exclusiveness. As being the true whole of humanity, it can admit no rival or co-ordinate form of life (much less any more deep and so more comprehensive than itself), and it must necessarily exclude thus as false and contrary to humanity itself all that may affect to represent this beyond its own range and sphere.
5. No other order of human life can have the same character. It is not of the nature of the civil state or commonwealth, to be thus catholic; and still less does it belong to any single constituent sphere of such political organization, separately taken. Even religion, which claims to be the last sense of man’s life from the start, and which is therefore in consistency bound and urged under all forms to assert some sort of whole or universal title in its own favor, is found to be in truth unequal always to this high pretension, till it comes to its own proper and only sufficient completion in Christ. No system of Paganism of course could ever be catholic. So a catholic Mohammedanism is a contradiction in terms. More than this, it never lay in the nature of Judaism itself, with all its truth, to take up into itself the whole life of the world. To do so, it must pass into a higher form, and so lose its own distinctive character, in Christianity. No faith could say truly, “I believe in a holy catholic Judaism”—even if all nations were brought to submit to circumcision before its eyes; for it is not in the power of Judaism as such to possess and represent in full harmony the whole idea of humanity; and what is thus not in itself possible, and so not true, can never be the object really of faith in its true form. Judaism is not the deepest power of man’s life in the form of religion, and for this reason alone it must be found in the end a comparatively partial and relative power; leaving room for a different consciousness over against itself, with a certain amount of legitimacy and right too in the face of its narrow claims, under the general form of Gentilism. This contradiction is brought to an end in Christ (the true Peace of the world as we have it Eph. ii: 14–18), in and by whom religion, the inmost fact of man’s nature, is carried at once to its last and most perfect significance, and so to the lowest profound of this nature at the same time; with power thus to take up the entire truth of it into its own universally comprehensive law; healing its disorders, restoring its harmony, and raising it finally to immortality and glory. Only what is in this way deeper than all besides, can be at the same time truly catholic, of one measure with the whole compass and contents of our universal life.
6. As no other form of religion can be catholic, so it lies in the very nature of Christianity as here shown to have this character. It must be catholic. Conceive of it, or try to exhibit it, as in its constitution less comprehensive than the whole nature of man, or as not sufficient to take this up universally into its sphere of redemption, and you wrong it in its inmost idea. It must be commensurate with the need and misery of the world as a whole, or come under its own reproach of having begun to build where it has no power to finish. Say, that it is for all mankind, except the Malay race or the many millions of China; and our whole sense at once revolts against the declaration as monstrous. Substitute for such geographical limitation the notion of an invisible line, in the form of an outward unconditional decree, setting a part of the race on one side in a state of real salvability, and another part of it on the other side in a state of necessary reprobation, the atonement being in its own nature available or of actual force in one direction only and not in the other; and the spirit of the whole New Testament again rises into solemn protest. Under the same general view again it is monstrous, as we have already seen, to conceive of a line being interposed in the way of Christianity, in the interior organism of man’s general nature itself; leaving one tract of it free to the occupancy of this new power, but requiring it to stop on the frontier limits of another (politics, trade, science, art, philosophy); as though it were deep enough and broad enough to take in a part of the great fact of humanity only, but not the whole. Or take now finally another form of limitation, not unfrequently forced on the idea of what is called the Church in these last days. Suppose a line cutting the universal process of humanity, as a fact never at rest but in motion always from infancy to old age, into two great sections; for the one of which only there is room or place in the restorational system here under consideration while the other including all infants is hopelessly out of its reach—unless death so intervene as to make that possible in another world by God’s power, which is not possible here by his grace.47 Is the thought less monstrous, we ask, than any of the suppositions which have gone before? The redemption of the gospel, as it is the absolute end of all religion besides and the full destiny of man, cannot be less broad in its own nature than the whole life it proposes to renovate and redeem. Shall there be imagined any room or place in this for the dark reign of sin—any island of the sea, any remote nation or tribe, any reprobate caste, any outside moral tract, any stadium of infancy or unripe childhood—where the reign of grace (formed to overwhelm it, Rom. v: 15–21) has no power to follow and make itself triumphantly felt? That were indeed to wrong this kingdom in its primary conception. It must be catholic, the true whole of God’s image in man, the recovery of it potentially from the centre of his nature out to its farthest periphery, in order to be itself the truth and no lie.
7. As the attribute of catholicity is distinctively characteristic of the Church as such, it follows that no mere sect or fragment of this can effectively appropriate the title. The idea of a sect is, that a part of the christian world has been brought to cut itself off from the rest of it, on the ground of some particular doctrinal or practical interest, and now affects to have within itself under such isolated view all church powers and resources, though admitting at the same time the existence of such powers & resources in other bodies also with which it owns no real church union. This is a vast contradiction from the very start, which is found to work itself out afterwards into all sorts of anomaly and falsehood. The sect virtually puts itself always into the place of the Church, and in spite of its own principle of division is then forced to arrogate to itself the proper rights and prerogatives of this divine organization, as though it were identical with its own narrow limits. In other words, it is forced to act as the whole, when it is in truth by its own confession again only a segment or part. So far as any remnant of church feeling remains (such as is needed for instance to distinguish a sect in its own mind from a voluntary confederation for religious ends), it must necessarily include in it the idea of catholicity or wholeness, as an indestructible quality of such thought; for as it lies in the very conception of a sphere to be round, so precisely does it lie in the very conception of the Church to be catholic, that is to be as universal in its constitution as humanity itself, with no tract or sphere beyond. Hence every sect, in pretending to be sufficient within itself for all church ends, practically at least if not theoretically asserts in its own favor powers and prerogatives that are strictly universal, as broad as the idea of religion itself under
