The Catholic Church has never condemned a heresy more false or destructive than the proposition that she is herself but one of the divisions of the Christian church, having no authority to speak or to rule in the name of her Lord. {199} To deny that the one church of Christ is now existing, and that she has existed for ages, is to deny not merely a fact in history, but it is to deny the word of our Lord; and to do that, is to deny alike his holiness and his divinity. How can the Catholic Church treat with those who wish to make terms before submitting to her authority, on the basis of a positive untruth? Catholicity is not an inheritance, to be decided among many claimants, no one of whom has any right to be or to be regarded as the sole heir of the homestead; but it is an estate left by the divine Lord of the manor, in charge of the Prince of the Apostles and his successors, on the express injunction that it is to be kept one and undivided, in trust for the benefit of the faithful for all time. The estate has been kept one and undivided, according to the title-deed; the injunction has never been broken; notwithstanding all defections from the household, the homestead of the Christian world remains in the hands of the same faithful succession to which it was committed by our Lord himself. May God grant that all the younger sons who have gone astray, may return with penitential alacrity to their Father's house! The Catholic Church will not stop in her progress, until she has converted the world to Christ; but she has not denied, and will not deny, her sacred trust and prerogative of catholicity for the sake even of adding whole nations to her fold. Whoever enters her fold must admit by that act her claim to be the one, undivided, indivisible Church of Christ. There can be no "branches of the Catholic Church" which are not directly joined to the root and trunk of catholicity. A severed branch is no branch. It is not the fault of the Catholic Church that multitudes "who profess and call themselves Christians" are not members of her communion. She affords the very largest liberty for individual or associated action that can be yielded without denying her faith or her commission. The highest poetry and the severest logic may kneel in brotherly harmony at her altar. Gifts and talents the most diverse have been consecrated to her service. The Catholic Church advancing, century after century, under the banner of the cross and dove, to the spiritual conquest of the world! how far more sublime a spectacle it is than that of some parts of Christendom, which are broken into little independent bands of sectarian skirmishers, keeping up a kind of guerrilla warfare against "the world, the flesh, and the devil," and each other.