Since the Church would be nought else but the Body of Christ, the realization in history of His divine and human Being, therefore the glorified Christ is the proper source of her power and authority, so much so that this authority is exercised only in His name and in the true and deepest sense belongs only to Him. The whole constitution of the Church is completely aristocratic and not democratic, her authority coming from above, from Christ, and not from below, from the community. The new powers come from Christ, the Incarnate God, and from Him flow through the apostles to the Church. That ancient African writer, Tertullian, stressed this fact as early as the second century in the pregnant sentence: “The Church is from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God.”[5] The apostles did not act in their own right, but as “sent” and as representatives of Christ: “He that heareth you, heareth me, and he that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me, despiseth Him that sent me” (Luke x, 16; cf. Mt. x, 40). And the apostles on their part, as the New Testament in general and the pastoral epistles in particular show us, appointed by imposition of hands, wherever they founded new communities, the “firstlings,” i.e., the first converts, to be leaders (proestotes) who should, as St. Peter so strikingly and beautifully says (I Peter v, 2) “shepherd the flock of God” in their stead. So the apostolic authority did not reside in the communities, but in the elders, leaders, overseers, who were chosen by the apostles in the name of Christ to take their place. And after the death of the apostles it was these elders who transmitted the authority which had been committed to them, by the imposition of hands, and organized the new communities round men empowered with this authority. Certainly the communities played their part in the matter, and helped by their advice to determine who should be entrusted with the commission. But in itself the power was exclusively an apostolic power, a thing reserved to the bishops who derived from the apostles. We may assert that the whole literature of early Christianity attests this conception. It is developed with classic lucidity in one of the earliest of Christian writings, the “First Epistle of St. Clement” (Ad Cor. xliv, 3).