And so, to conclude, an estimate of the nature of the Church in the light of our Lord’s eschatological teaching yields these two points: In the first place we see that the foundation of the Church is in the direct line of His thought. For the very reason that the Kingdom of Heaven is established in the immediate present and must by the Father’s will wait a long time yet for the Coming of the Bridegroom, it is necessary that the pearl of great price should be provided with a protective shell, that the new spirit of God’s governance should have a body, in order to pass unscathed through history. But since this present Kingdom is completed only in the future, therefore the life of the Church also is ordinated towards that future. The Church, founded on the one Peter, is a society awaiting the parousia, and her nature is fundamentally eschatological. And so her dogma is in its purpose a preparation for the future vision. “Now we see only a mirror…. but then face to face.” Therefore her creed closes with the confession of belief in the life everlasting. Her liturgy seeks to adumbrate and anticipate by means of visible and transitory signs the glories of eternity. Her sacraments are anticipatory pledges of a future consummation. They convey that light of grace which is to pass one day into the light of glory. All her prayers and all her penance are inspired by the great hope: the Lord cometh. And so in her attitude she is not of this world, but of the next. Of course she recognizes and uses the things of this world, but she does so only so far as they relate to the other world and to the life eternal. Just as her Lord and Master saw and valued all contemporary events only in their inward connection with the great thing that was to come, so the Church also affirms in every present thing only its final and eternal value. She enlarges our life, and raises it from transitory values into eternity. She grasps the future in the present, and eternity in time. The Christian at prayer knows not time, as mere time. He does not allow himself to be governed by time and its movement. He is not the plaything of time, but lives in the eternal. His attitude is consciously supra-temporal. He “uses the world as though he used it not. For the fashion of this world passeth away” (1 Cor. vii, 31).