The relations between State and Church in Lutheranism may be regarded as an indirect justification of the Catholic doctrine of the Church’s nature. According to the Catholic view Christ founded the sublime structure of the Church as a free spiritual society. He willed that the saving grace he had won by His Death should be applied to the souls of men by means of a visible and independent institution, which, inspired by Him with His own ideal and holy aims and equipped with her own peculiar rights, should work for the salvation of mankind until the end of the world. Hence, the advocates of the olden Church not only set the idea of the Church in the foreground of the struggle, but they also explored, enlarged on and illumined this idea with the help of Holy Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers. Such was the work of men like Eck, Cochlæus, Johann Fabri, Bishop of Vienna, and Catharinus, and, in the same century, of Melchior Canus, Peter Canisius, Bellarmine and Stapleton. They indeed allowed the inward side of the Church—its soul as it has been called—to come into its rights, but, at the same time, they maintained with equal firmness its thoroughly visible character, above all they insisted on the hierarchy with the successor of St. Peter at its head as the holder of the threefold spiritual power—which Luther denied—of shepherd, teacher and priest. On this point there could be no yielding. To those adherents of Luther’s who fancied they could reach union without the Church’s help and without an entire acceptance of the Catholic doctrine, Eck addressed the following: “There is no middle course and words are of no avail; whoever wishes to make himself one in faith with the Catholic Church must submit to the Pope and the Councils and believe what the Roman Church teaches; all else is wind and vapour, though one should go on disputing for a hundred years.”[1213] What the above Catholic polemics said may be summed up as follows:— Because the Church, according to Christ’s plan, was to be an independent and living institution, His future “kingdom” and “heavenly vineyard,” it replaced the Jewish synagogue by an even better institution. This Church was to be indestructible and the gates of hell were not to prevail against her (Matt. xvi. 18).