This is a thought which does not lie on the surface, but we must grasp it if we would understand the visible nature of the Church, her external manifestation. If Christ is what the Church confesses Him to be, the Incarnate God and Savior of men—as indeed He is—then it must be His mission to reunite to God mankind as a unity, as a whole, and not this or that individual man. The wretchedness of fallen humanity, the essence of the original sin, consisted in this, that the supernatural union with God, in which man was originally created, and through which alone he could attain his perfection, his wholeness, his completion, was by Adam’s fall broken and dissolved. When Adam fell away from God, all humanity in him and through him fell away likewise. That is a basic conviction of Christianity, which was adumbrated in certain post-canonical Jewish writings, and received formulation as a Christian doctrine especially at the hands of St. Paul. At the basis of this Christian dogma of an original and inherited sin, and of our redemption through the new man Christ, lies the great and striking thought that mankind must not be regarded as a mass of homogeneous beings successively emerging and passing away, nor merely as a sum of men bound together by unity of generation, as being descendants of one original parent, but as one single man. So closely are men assimilated to one another in their natural being, in body and in mind, so profoundly are they interlocked in thinking, willing, feeling, and acting, so solitary is their life, their virtue and their sin, that they are considered in the divine plan of redemption only as a whole, only as a unity, only as one man. This one man is not the individual man, but the whole man, the totality of the innumerable expressions of that humanity which is reproduced in countless individuals. This one man includes all men who were thousands of years ago and all who shall be thousands of years hence. Such is the one man, the whole man. And the guilt and destiny of every single man, though certainly his own guilt and his own destiny, yet affect the whole of humanity in proportion to the importance which Providence has assigned him in the organism of humanity.