It is quite natural that those races which, by God’s providence, have been intimately connected with the church from her cradle should be inclined to think that the church is confined to their keeping and is inseparable from their existence. Christianity and the church are undoubtedly affected in their development by the peculiarities of the races through which they are transmitted, and it is natural that they should accentuate those truths and bring to the front those features of organization which commend themselves most to the genius, instincts, and wants of certain races. This is only stating a general law held as a maxim among philosophers: _Whatever is received, is received according to the form of the recipient_. Thus, the contact of the church with the intellectual gifts of the Greeks was the providential occasion of the explicit development and dogmatic definition of the sublimest mysteries of the Christian revelation. And through her connection with the Latins, whose genius runs in the direction of organization and law, the church perfected her hierarchy and brought forth those regulations necessary to her existence and well-being known under the name of “Canon Law.” The objective point of Christianity, the church of Christ, is to embrace in her fold all mankind; but she is, in her origin, essence, and institution, independent of any human being, or race of men, or state, or nation. The Italians, the Spaniards, the French, or any other nation or nations, may renounce the faith and abandon the church, as England and several nations did in the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, yet the church exists and is none the less really and essentially Catholic. The church has existed in all her divinity without including any one nationality or race, and, if it please God, can do so again. The sun would give forth its light the same though there were no objects within the reach of its rays, as when they are reflected from nature and display all their hidden beauty; so the divinity of the Catholic Church would exist in all its reality and power the same though there were no Christians to manifest it by their saintly lives, as at some future day when, after the victory over her enemies, she will unite in one the whole human race, and all her hidden glory will be displayed. This law also holds good and is applicable to her visible head, the supreme pastor of the faithful. The pope, as pope, was no less the father of the faithful and exercised his jurisdiction when driven into the Catacombs, or violently taken by a despot and imprisoned at Fontainebleau, or, as at present, forced by the action of a desperate faction of Italians into retirement in the Vatican, than when his independence and authority were recognized and sustained by the armies of the Emperor Constantine or defended by the sword of Charlemagne, the crowned emperor of Christendom.