Of primary importance for this educative task is the Church’s claim to authority, to the special divine authority which she asserts in her preaching of the word of God. It is true that non-Catholic bodies also preach of Christ and His Kingdom, and we thank God that they do so. But the Catholic Church alone preaches like her divine Master, like one “having power” (Mt. vii, 29). By the unbroken series of her bishops she stands in a real, historical connection with Christ and His apostles. She alone can truly say, Lo, here is Christ! here are the apostles! And the unimpaired unity of her faith and love guarantees that her objective connection with Christ is a connection of the spirit also, inspired by the Spirit of Pentecost. No mere human authority can have intruded itself here where Christ alone preaches. As the one group of our Lord’s disciples extended through space and time, the Church and the Church alone can stand before men and claim for her preaching the authority which Jesus gave to His disciples in the words: “He that heareth you, heareth me; and he that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me” (Lk. x, 16). Therefore the Catholic hearkens to the Church’s teaching with unfeigned respect and unlimited confidence. He does not pick and choose, or exercise private judgment, or withhold his assent, or take up an evasive attitude. For him the words Christ and the Church form one phrase and connote a single thing. So that the Church’s preaching has an overwhelming power and an absolute validity. It sets a standard, and it is a law. But it is not a law that comes upon the Catholic as something external and alien to himself, to which he submits resignedly as he would to the ukase of an absolute monarch. Catholicism does not recognize any heteronomous morality of that sort, which submits itself to some alien law because and in so far as it is an alien law. The theologians are unanimous in deprecating that spiritual state wherein a man’s moral activity is determined only by fear and compulsion. The Catholic recognizes in the ordinary and extraordinary teaching of the Church the expression of God’s will. He knows that the Church does not make the divine law of faith and morals, but only authoritatively attests it, its contents and its validity. The law is the requirement of God, nor is it as such an arbitrary dictate of the divine will—no important theologian, not even Duns Scotus, has ever understood the divine law in that way—but the revelation of the divine Wisdom, Sanctity and Goodness. Its positive ordinances represent the ideal of humanity as the eternal Wisdom and Love desire it to be realized, and the new man as God’s design would have him. Of its essence, therefore, the law of God does not impose a burden on human nature, but is an enriching, fulfilling and perfecting of it. It is a life-giving truth and a life-giving law. And therefore the Catholic affirms it in the light of his practical reason and by a free choice of his will makes it his own, so that it becomes his own law, an act of his moral freedom, a determination of his moral conscience. Therefore conscience makes the objective law its own. In that sense is it that conscience is the proximate and immediate norm of human action; but it is a norm which is orientated to the objective law. There is no room here for the arbitrary. Conscience, to use St. Thomas’s words, is the “coming of divine precept to man” (perventio praecepti divini ad hominem, De veritate, Q. xvii, A. 4, ad 2). For in a normal man the rational will that operates in the decisions of conscience is ordinated to nothing else than to the realm of the objectively good and holy, that is, to the will of God. Therefore the moral life of a Catholic is not governed by an alien law nor by a subjective law, but by the will of God, inasmuch as his conscience considers itself bound by the objective norms of divine revelation.