The one perpetual sacrifice thus instituted in His Church, to be offered from His first to His second coming, carrying in it indissolubly the great truths of His religion, the life and the unity of His people, this is the instrument which He used to impress His High-Priesthood on the world; and He set up the one episcopate as the bearer of the one priesthood. The government of His Church is not an external magistracy, but rests on the mass of worship and doctrine intimately blent together, so that the outward regimen and the inward belief form an indissoluble unity in the daily practice. In this unity we must likewise comprehend the jurisdiction expressed in planting and maintaining belief and worship throughout the world. For our Lord is a King, and came to establish a kingdom; not several kingdoms, nor a confederation of states, but one kingdom, concerning which His people confesses for ever, in the words of the angel who announced His coming, "Of His kingdom there shall be no end." But without jurisdiction, that is, without the power which says to one man, "Go here," and to another, "Go there," the first foundation of a kingdom was as impossible as was its continuance and permanence. All the records of that ancient Church which fought a victorious battle with the Roman Empire and received a civil enfranchisement from the Emperor Constantine tend to show that the principle of hierarchical order was very strong in it, and was most severely maintained. It could not be well stated in a more absolute form than in the letter of Pope St. Clement above quoted. But the Church which met in representation at the great Nicene Council offers a perfect picture of what that order was, working itself out in absolute independence of the Civil Power through three centuries from the Day of Pentecost. In the diocese the bishop's jurisdiction was complete. No priest was independent in the exercise of his functions. Thus jurisdiction in the interior forum entered into the daily dispensing of the sacraments. For a long time the Holy Eucharist was dispensed by the bishop from one altar, and sent from him to the sick. He was the imposer of penance, and when, as churches and priests multiplied, the system of parishes and parish priests arose, they executed all their functions in complete subordination to the bishop, whose title in those early times was taken from the rite on which all his power rested, when he is called pre-eminently Sacerdos, _i.e._, the sacrificing priest. Within the limits of the diocese there can be no sort of doubt that the idea of jurisdiction was perfectly realised in practice.