visible Church and the invisible communion of saints is no more than the distinction between potentiality and actuality. All members of the visible Church are regenerate in holy baptism; they are in the first disposition towards the mind of Christ; they are saints in posse. Even those whose lives are openly profane and evil, until in God's mysterious economy of probation they justly forfeit the capability of recovery,' are of the nature of saints. I say of the nature, because though they are capable of the energies and habits of holiness, they do not possess them. They hold their capability in unrighteousness; but they who by docile following of the spirit of God become holy in energy and habit, are saints in esse, in realized and actual holiness. They are one with Christ by a conscious moral choice, by the deliberate election of the conscience, and by the fast cleaving of the heart. Their wills are energetically one with His will; and they are partakers of an incorporation and co-adunation of body, soul, and spirit, which transcends the sense and understanding. To take, once more, an illustration often used already. The one visible Church is to this invisible communion what the visible partakers of the blessed Eucharist are to the invisible fellowship of those who verily and indeed receive the body and blood of Christ: they are the elect fruit of the elect vine, the ripeness of the regenerate seed. And this blessed company

make up the true mystical body of Christ,' of which the visible Church is but the symbol and ministrative cause, subordinate to the spirit of God. We have now made good a distinction which will serve as a principle to adjust in some measure the phenomena of Christendom with the doctrine here laid down.

We must revert once more to the distinction of unity into objective and subjective, and take in order the anomalies which are found without and within the Church of Christ. We will consider first the case of those who have wholly forfeited the objective unity both in doctrine and discipline; then of those who have made a partial forfeit; that is, first, of the doctrine, retaining the discipline, secondly, of the discipline, retaining the doctrine; and next, the state of those who have retained the objective unity both in doctrine and discipline, but have lost the subjective unity of communion and intercourse.

1

Stapleton, quoted by Field, on the Church, p. 17.

CHAPTER II.

THE LOSS OF OBJECTIVE UNITY.

THE first case we have to consider is the case of those who have wholly forfeited the objective unity both of doctrine and discipline. Such, for instance, are the sects who have rejected the mystery of the proper Godhead of our Lord Jesus Christ; and those who have rejected the Holy Sacraments.

In the first place we may observe that these sects are not necessarily formal, but only material, heretics. The first originators of their error were guilty of the heresy and the schism; but their descendants have inherited their actual state without partaking necessarily of its moral cause. It is, indeed, true that, as each man grows up to the full development of his personal responsibility, he may appropriate to himself the act of his forefathers by his own direct conscious act of moral consent and choice. He may also pertinaciously defend his error against sufficient admonition. But it is possible-indeed, almost certainthat among the descendants of the first propounders of the delusion, there are many whose moral nature

has never been exercised by any form of probation in the matter of their error. At every remove from the first impulse the momentum of active participation declined. In a few generations it was exhausted; and their successors inherited a corrupt tradition, rather with passive acquiescence than with conscious approval. By this involuntary apostasy a grave injury was inflicted on their moral being. The bias of their mind was insensibly and involuntarily determined to a false idea. Their free disposition, which should have been reserved for the impressions of truth, was pre-occupied by error; and their intellectual nature received false stamps and characters, and erroneous inclinations. No one can say how deep and lasting an injury is wrought in the texture of the human mind, when its first action is to coalesce with delusion and falsehood. It seems to sear and to distort it almost beyond recovery. With this moral indisposition come also intellectual hindrances. The constant action of a false system, and the absolute exclusion of truth, make ignorance invincible. Oftentimes they may have never heard a surmise of any form of truth except their own inherited belief; or they have heard of it only with contempt and opposition. Their better feelings are enlisted in a war、 fare against truth, conceived to be falsehood. All these are mitigating pleas in their moral probation. Add to these the spiritual penury to which they were born, the moral destitution of their fathers' home; no witness for truth, no sacraments of grace,

no gentle suasion, and moulding pressure of a spiritual discipline; and there can hardly be conceived an immortal being in a state more impoverished and desolate.

Now, nothing can be more certain than that among such sects there are to be found many approximations to the reality of Christian life. We find a solid morality, a great love of truth so far as it is known, real self-denial, energy and zeal in works of benevolence, and uprightness of conscience before God. Of these there are abundant instances; so many and so visible, indeed, as to betray some minds, more active than enlarged, into a theory that the common measure of everyday temptations is reduced in their case by the Enemy of Truth, whose cause their very virtues tend to serve. Although this may be among his arch-devices, yet it will not account for the undeniable forms of obedience in those who escape from his dominion. There can be but one only Author of good in them ; that is, the same who out of the moral anarchy even of the regenerate educes the unseen unity of saints. Wheresoever we see forms of Christian obedience among those who have lost the doctrine and discipline of the Church, they are so many moral miracles they are revelations in fact; which are, therefore, no way contrary to God's revelation in word. He has promised to sanctify man through His Church; He has not declared that He will sanctify none in other ways. Through His Church