And, therefore, the Church has no use for any merely human and temporal civilization; her ideal is an eternal one, and consists in the establishment of God’s Kingdom in the souls of men. Wherever a purely human ideal seeks to assert itself and men are taken captive by values less than the ultimate value, then the Church proves herself an irreconcilable opponent. This is the point in which she separates herself most profoundly from the world. She cannot rest in time. Whenever a purely worldly outlook shows itself, whether it be in the university, or in the busy marketplace, or even in the home, she will never cease to cry her “Be ye ready!” to all and sundry. This is the vital center of her being. Wherever the Church encounters the world, in philosophy and science, in politics and law, in art and literature, there the eternal impinges on the temporal, the divine on the human, and the Kingdom of Christ on the kingdom of this world.

That is the first point. And the second point is this, that the Church, in the light of our Lord’s eschatological teaching, is seen to be necessarily incomplete and imperfect. The Church of the present is not as yet the whole and full Kingdom of God. It is a field of wheat in which there is still much cockle, a net that contains both good and bad fish. True, the spirit that dominates her is the Spirit of Jesus, and the forces that pulsate through her are the living forces of her risen Savior. But the men in whom this divine life is active are men confined within the bonds of their corrupt bodies, and therefore they are incomplete men and will remain so, until the Lord come. Moreover there will always be men in whom God’s word does not take root, and who will be like the cockle and grow till the harvest. That is the tragedy of the Church and God’s present Kingdom, that there should be this contrast between her temporal manifestation and her divine idea, between her actual state and that great and holy thing which liveth in her. But our hope is not illusory: this tragedy shall receive its happy solution on that day when Christ comes again. The Catholic turns his gaze away from all imperfection and wretchedness, from his own sins and the sins of his fellow Catholics, and looks forward with confident hope—exactly as did the first Christians of Corinth and Thessalonica—to the day when the Bridegroom shall come. Maranatha—come, Lord Jesus!

Endnotes

1.      Heiler, op. cit., p. 43.

2.      ibid.

3.      ibid ., p. 25.

4.      ibid., p 35

5.      ibid ., p. 3.

6.      H. Weinel, “Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments” 1918, p. 82.

Chapter VI: The Church and Peter

“Upon this rock I will build my Church” (Mt. xvi, 18).