Much has been written and more said about "the church of the future," as though it were to be some millennial manifestation altogether different from the historic church; but the church of the future, which is not also the church of the past and of the present, can be no church; for a true church must reach to the ages back as well as to those before. {196} If the continuity is broken, truth is broken, and cannot be restored. As for eighteen centuries there have been no forms of civil society, no calms or tempests in the moral, political, social, or religious world, in which the Catholic Church has not been true to the organic principles of her divine life, even the enemy of catholicity should admit--that fact being granted--that the presumption is on her side that she will be equally true to those principles during the centuries that are to come. He may deny that the church has been true, and, consequently, that she will be true, but he will not admit one proposition and deny the other; he will admit both or deny both. In other words, he will admit, equally with the friend of catholicity, the identity of the church, past, present, and to come. Now, it will be impossible for a friend or enemy of the Catholic Church, from her beginning to this very day, to point to an hour when she was not a living church; it is, then, probable, that she will continue to be a living church. But where, since the promulgation of Christianity to this time, has existed a body of Christian believers, which, for the quality of continual existence, has so good a right to be called the church of Christ as the Catholic Church? Considering her numbers, extent, and duration, that church has been preeminently the church of the past; considering numbers, extent, and duration, that church is pre-eminently the church of the present; considering all analogies and probabilities, then the Catholic Church will be preeminently the church of the future. In truth, the vindictive anger of the enemies of the Catholic Church, in whatever form of opposition it may be shown, proceeds from the fact, not that she is the dead church of the past, as she is sometimes called, for there would be no reason to war with the dead, but because she is, as she has been and will be, the living church. The Catholic Church is hated not for being too dead, but for being too living. She has seen the birth and death of countless "improvements" of her principles, and she has received with gladness into her fold many an eager and conscientious inquirer for the "new church," who has at length reached an end of his wanderings and a solution of his doubts in finding, with tears of rapturous submission, that the new church, for which he was seeking, is the same church which has stood for ages, ever old, yet ever new, because representing Him who is alike the Living God and the Ancient of Days.