Three centuries of protests against the idea of the church and of her divine authority have served to bring the question of the necessity of the church and the claims of her authority squarely before the minds of all men who think on religious subjects. So general was the belief in them before the rise of Protestantism that theological works, even the _Sum_ of St. Thomas, did not contain what is now never omitted by theological writers: the “Tractatus de Ecclesia.” The violent protests of heresy, joined with the persecutions of the despotic power of the state, have ended in showing more clearly the divine institution of the church, and proving more conclusively her divine authority. “In poison there is physic.” The idea of the church is a divine conception, and the existence of the church is a divine creation. The church as a divine idea lies hid in God, and was an essential part of his preconceived plan in the creation of the universe. Hence the error of those who consider the church as the creation of “an assembly of individual Christian believers”; or as the product of the state, as in Prussia, Russia, England, and other countries; or as the effort of a race, as Dean Milman maintains in his _History of Latin Christianity_; or as “the conscious organization of the moral and intellectual forces and resources of humanity for a higher life than that which the state requires.” Hence also the failure of all church-builders and inventors of new religions from the earliest ages down to the Luthers, Calvins, Henry VIIIs., Wesleys, Charles Foxes, Mother Ann Lees, Joe Smiths, Döllingers, and Loysons, _et hoc genus omne_. Poor weak-minded men! had they the slightest idea of what the church of God is, or had they not become blind to it, they would sooner pretend to create a new universe than invent a new religion or start a new church. The human is impotent to create the divine. Christ alone could replace the Jewish Church by his own, and that because he was God. And this substitution was accomplished, not by the way of a revolutionary protest, but in the fulfilment of the types and figures of the Jewish Church and the realization of its divine prophecies and promises. The ideal church and the historical church which have existed upon earth from Adam until Noe, and from Noe until Moses, and from Moses until Christ, and from Christ until now, which is the actual Catholic Church, are divine in their idea, are divine in their institution, are divine in their action, and their continuity is one and unbroken. The church can suffer no breaks without annihilation.