simple and absolute necessity of visible unity and outward communion? Where then are we to find the cause which induced so many learned and able Protestants first to imagine this distinction between the necessity of internal and external communion and unity, and then to deceive themselves and others with such a mockery? The real cause was, as I believe, that having denied the institution of the Primacy, and the authority lodged in it for the purpose of forming and maintaining unity, they were without a criterion or proof, in virtue of which, among so many Christian societies divided from and condemning each other, they could safely choose the one with which they were to be joined in communion, and the outward unity of duty and obedience. For they would readily conclude that the unity so often commended in Scripture, and so earnestly enjoined, could not be external, since God, who does not command impossibilities, had instituted no visible sign to mark that company of Christians, which alone among all the rest was the continuation and development of the Church founded by Christ, and built up by the Apostles. C. From the same source must the third Protestant doctrine on unity be derived. [82]Jurien filled up the sketch of this, which [83]Casaubon, [84]Claude, and [85]Mestrezat had drawn, and it became so popular as not only to infect a large number of Protestants, but to exert a withering influence on certain unstable members of the Catholic body. It teaches that we must believe not only in an internal and spiritual, but in a visible and external unity, for the Scriptures plainly urge its necessity, and Christian tradition fully describes it, so that there is not a truth more patent or established on greater authority; but this unity is restricted within narrow bounds, and confined to the articles called fundamental, though as to how many these are no one defender of the system is agreed with another. For it is sufficient for Christians not to differ in the profession of such articles for them to be deemed members of one and the same Church. Whence they infer that one and the same true Church is made up out of almost all Christian societies, the Roman, the Greek, the Nestorian, the Eutychian, the Waldensian, the Lutheran, the Anglican, and the Calvinist, for their differences, important as they are, offer no hindrance to the unity which Christ enjoined, the Apostles preached, the creeds express, and universal tradition demands. As Bossuet,[86] the brothers Walemburg,[87] Nicole,[88] and even some Protestants have most fully dealt with this portentous opinion, there is no need to urge much against it here. I prefer repeating the question, what _occasion_ the Protestants had to get up so unheard-of a paradox, and a system so absurd? It was twofold: one theoretical, and the other practical.