But though it be granted that His hostility to the Pharisees is not incompatible with His founding a Church, yet is not the rest of His teaching inspired by ideas which cannot be reconciled with such a design? Did not Jesus believe that the end of the world was at hand and that the Kingdom of God would come down from heaven in His own generation? The so-called “eschatological” school in particular lay great stress on this idea. It regards this “recognition of the eschatological character of the Gospel of Jesus” as the “Copernican fact of modern theology.” “It overthrows the dogmatic structure of Catholicism with a single blow and unhinges the colossal fabric of the Roman Church.”[5] If Jesus believed that the end was near, He cannot have regarded His group of disciples as a lasting community, and He cannot have committed to them more than a purely personal authority. If, then, we wish to secure the historical foundations of the Catholic Church, we must face this eschatological question squarely. The problem may be resolved, for precision’s sake, into two particular questions. In the first place, we may ask, is the Kingdom of God which Jesus announced a purely celestial thing which descends miraculously from heaven at a definite point in time, or a Kingdom which has its commencement and its roots in our world and in our time, but which will reach its maturity and perfection only in the world to come? It is obvious that Jesus can have intended to found a Church, in the natural sense of those words, only in the latter case. The second question is intimately connected with this and is as follows: Did Jesus really share the error of certain apocalyptic circles of His time and surroundings, and believe that the Day of the Lord was very near at hand? If that be so, then again He cannot have founded a lasting Church. Let us now consider the first of these two questions.