Therefore above all it was the living word which was to bring the new faith to mankind. “The things which thou hast heard of me before many witnesses, the same commend to faithful men who shall be fit to teach others also” (2 Tim. ii, 2). Such was St. Paul’s charge to his disciple Timothy. But even the living word did not achieve the work of itself. For it worked, as St. Augustine expressed it, only on the outer and not on the inner man. It reached only “to the ear, and not to the heart.” The supernatural, final, highest certitude came from the working of the Spirit. And since the Holy Spirit, since the divine of its nature communicates itself to all men, to the collective whole, and is of its very nature creative and enkindling life, therefore the Holy Spirit of its nature works only in and through a comprehensive, living community, through the unity of love, through the unity in fullness. The catholicity and unity of the Pentecostal miracle were permanently embodied in the spirit of love and fellowship of the Christian communities, animated by Christ and gathered round the apostles and Peter especially. These communities were “one heart and one soul,” planted by one apostolical preaching, brought to interior growth by one Holy Spirit. This Spirit was sacramentally guaranteed to them in the visible signs of Baptism and Confirmation. Baptism gave admission into the new spiritual fellowship, and the sacrament of Confirmation sealed and perfected this admission. This Spirit deepened the natural effect of the apostolic preaching and led to the intuitive experience that “the Lord is a Spirit” (2 Cor. iii, 17).

Therefore it was not literary records, incontestable documents, which were the primary means of bringing the message of Jesus to men, but the broad stream of the uniform life of faith of the primitive Church, a life based on the preaching of the apostles and animated by the Holy Spirit. How could it have been otherwise? A living thing, in all its depth and in all its extent, cannot be comprised within a few written sentences. Only that which is dead can be adequately delineated in writing. The living thing is continually bursting the temporary form in which literature must perforce embody it. At the very moment that literature is endeavoring to arrest and fix it, the stream of life is escaping and moving swiftly on. Therefore all literature, and even the Bible itself, is stamped with the character of its time, and bears a form which, however vital its content remains, yet all too easily seems stiff and strange to later generations.