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 its most perfect and absolute form; an assumption that goes virtually to deny and set aside all similar church character in the case of other sects; for the case forbids the notion of two or more systems, separately clothed with the same universal force. Nothing short of such claim to exclusive wholeness is involved in the right each sect asserts for itself, to settle doctrines, make laws, and ply the keys, in a way that is held to be for the bounds of its own communion absolutely whole and final. Such ecclesiastical acts either mean nothing, sink into the character of idle sham, or else they are set forth as the utterances of a real church authority which is taken to be as wide as the idea of the Church itself. Every sect in this way, so far as it secretly owns the power of this idea, puts on in mock proportion at least all the airs of Rome. But now, on the other hand, the inward posture of every sect again, as such, is at war with catholicity, and urges it also to glory in the fact. The sect mind roots itself in some subjective interest, made to take the place of the true objective whole of christianity, and around this it affects to revolve pedantically as an independent world or sphere. Then it is content to allow other spheres beyond itself, under the like independent form. So its universal rights and powers as we had them just before (rights and powers that mean nothing ecclesiastically save as they are thus catholic and not partial) shrink into given bounds; often ridiculously narrow; much like the power of those old heathen deities, whose universal sway was held to stop short with the limits of the nation that worshipped at their shrines. It is a power dogmatical, diatactical, and diacritical,48 as they call it, which