If we consider the Church’s claim to be the only Church wherein men may be saved in the clear and radiant light of her belief that God’s grace knows no bounds or limits to its operation, we at once see the true and profound meaning of that claim. The Church understands it to mean that by virtue of the express institution of Christ she represents in the economy of salvation the ordinary proper institute of the truth and grace of Jesus on the earth. In the Catholic Church the saving power, which was revealed in Christ, flows into the world with original force, in untroubled purity, and in complete and exhaustive fullness. With original force—for while non-Catholic bodies owe such Christian truth and grace as they possess to the Catholic Church, the Church receives it through no intermediary but direct and fresh from our Lord Himself. She is in fact nothing else but His body of disciples, expanded in space and time. In untroubled purity—for she has not, like the various sects, contaminated her Christian heritage with novelties and modernisms, but has in the unbroken series of her bishops maintained it as immaculately pure as she received it from Christ. In exhaustive fullnessfor she does not choose only this or that precious jewel, but she calls her own the whole inheritance of revealed truth contained in Scripture and Tradition. Therefore the Church is the true and ordinary institute of the grace and truth of Jesus. But that does not prevent there being, alongside this ordinary institute, extraordinary ways of salvation, or hinder the grace of Christ from visiting particular men without the mediation of the Church. But because and in so far as the Body of Christ comprehends all those who are saved by Christ, those also who are visited by His grace in this immediate way belong to His Church. It is true that they do not belong to its outward and visible body, but they certainly belong to its invisible, supernatural soul, to its supernatural substance. For the grace of Christ never works in the individual in an isolated fashion, but always in the unity of His Body. This-point is repeatedly emphasized by St. Augustine: “Wouldst thou live by the Spirit of Christ, thou must be in the Body of Christ…. For only the Body of Christ can live by the Spirit of Christ” (In ev. Joann. xxvi, 13; cf. xxvii, 6). And thus it holds good, even for those brethren who are thus separated from the visible organism of the Church, that they too are saved in the Church, and not without her or in opposition to her.