these things may and do lead men towards the truth; they may and do illustrate it, when it has been first received by them; they may and do modify the method of its application to their various and changing needs; but in its essence the Divine message remains always and unchangeably the same, having its foundations forever laid not in the shifting and changeful vortex of human thought and speculation, but in the eternal and changeless realities of the unveiled world of God.

Thus we come to see the full intention and purpose of this Divine treasure in the ultimate prayer which our Lord offers for its Apostolic repositories. It was to become in the Apostles themselves an effectual centre of unity, subjecting and making subservient to its fuller manifestation whatever differing types of moral character, of intellectual development, of hereditary bent or resulting environment were to be found amongst the members of the Apostolic band; uniting into one free Divine harmony the various key-notes in which were pitched the utterances of a St. Peter or a St. John, of a St. Paul or a St. James. Thus in the vital unbroken unity of the Apostolic band was laid a firm foundation for the subsequent corporate unity of the Church of all time. "Holy Father, keep them in thy name which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are." No words could more emphatically reveal the heaven

ly, supramundane source of the unity of the original Apostolate. It was the reflection of a heavenly pattern eternally existing in the Being of God66 One as we are." It was the result of a Divine protection, in the sphere of the Revelation which the Lord had Himself brought from heaven to earth. The unity of the Church is thus a Divine and heavenly thing—a result of the ultimate manifestation of God in human flesh-" something let down into this lesser world from a higher plane of existence. Up above in the upper air is its spring and its source." The mysteries of God had been actually manifested in the facts of human life; and the result of this manifestation, as apprehended under the illumination of the Eternal Spirit, was to lift above the selfishness, mists and limitations of earth into the realization of a supreme and heavenly unity of Truth, a unity in which each several endowment and faculty of man would find at once its harmonious and its fruitful development. In the vital unity of the Apostolate, growing out of the uniqueness of the Revelation made in the Person of the Lord, built up under the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost, the Eternal Vicar of Christ on earth, was given at once the pledge and the foundation of the subsequent unity of the Catholic Church. No trace is to be found, in this fundamental teaching of our Lord Himself upon the express subject of the Church's

unity, of any exclusive function of St. Peter in the matter, or of the continuance of any such function in the succession of the Bishops of Rome as the necessary guardians of the Church's unity. Here, if anywhere, in this locus classicus of all Scripture on the subject of unity, we should expect some declaration from our Lord on a matter so vitally momentous to all subsequent ages. Yet not only do we find no hint of such a dogma, but we have the express implication of the contrary. The message which the Eternal Son had brought to earth had become for all subsequent time the message of the whole Apostolic band. All future believers must accept it as "their message," and for all such our Lord prays that, as the natural and normal result of this acceptance, they too may be one, after the same Divine and heavenly pattern as was seen in the primal unity of the Apostles themselves. The Roman theory of mechanical unity, through the unquestioning acceptance of the decrees of an infallible successor of St. Peter, rests upon conceptions absolutely foreign to the mind of our Blessed Lord, as that mind is in this Gospel laid open before us. Of one thing we may be well assured. Whensoever in God's good time the wounds of His Church shall be healed and her corporate unity restored, that great blessing will be vouchsafed to men upon the principles here enunciated by the Supreme Bishop and Pastor

of Souls. It will never be realized upon the basis of mechanical submission to a power which in its tyrannous and unlawful usurpation of functions entrusted by our Lord to the whole Apostolic college, and (so far as they could in the nature of the case be transmitted) to their successors in the collective Episcopate throughout the world, has ever been the fruitful source of discord and schisms. God hasten the day when the great Latin Patriarchate shall no longer cling to claims built up on unstable foundations of fraudulent history and wrested Scripture; but, discarding these legacies of the past which hide from the world her true glory, may stand forth, as in ancient times, the most powerful upholder of the authority of the teaching of the collective Apostolate, the centre of world-wide Christian intercourse and fellowship, in which the Apostolic tradition is most surely and fully conserved. The Lord in His good time hasten that glorious day. The Lord bless abundantly all who in that great Communion are praying and working for that magnificent ideal. Meanwhile our own path of duty is plain and clear. In the midst of a divided Christianity, confronted still by the same yoke of Papal absolutism against which our fathers struggled, but which, alas, in these latter days wears an accentuated and emphatic form unknown in their time, it is our high vocation and privilege to pro

claim as the true source of unity in the Church that message of the collective Apostolate to which our Lord here appeals. Those living authoritative voices sound forth unceasingly in the Catholic Church under the teaching of the everpresent Spirit, in the Apostolic writings of the New Testament. To the later Church, too, has been given the glory of a Divine indwelling to apply rightly the Divine fountain of Apostolic truth to the various needs of the Church's life. "The glory which thou hast given me I have given unto them" (the reference is to subsequent generations of believers) to the end that "they may be one, even as we are one; I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me."

The conception that the corporate unity of the Church was thus really established in the days of the Apostles themselves, and that subsequent divisions are consequently primarily due to the disregard of Apostolic authority and to declension from Apostolic teaching and example, derives much greater power and force from the results of recent historical investigation in regard to the actual character of the Apostolic age. We had been accustomed for the most part to apply to the whole period of Apostolic ministry the same picture of unbroken peace and unity which