This is an incidental passage out of a very short letter, in which the speaker is addressing practical exhortations to the people of a great church, founded by S. Paul about sixty years before, dwelt in by S. John up to about fifteen years of the time at which he was speaking. We should not in such a writing expect S. Ignatius to speak with the scientific correctness of a theologian, nor is he completely exhibiting his subject in a treatise; yet here, as it were at the first moment after the Apostles have left the earth, we have a picture of the Church as a world-wide institution, held together by a divine unity, which has its seat in the Person of Christ as the mind of the Father. It is a composite unity which is contemplated in the image of a harp with its strings pouring forth one song—the song of Christ—to the Father. It is a unity wide as the earth; for the bishops, placed in their several limits, constitute the mind of Christ, who is Himself the Father’s mind. It is the unity of the diocese, for it is summed up in the bishop: but it is the unity likewise of the whole Church, for the bishops are linked together in One whose mind they collectively represent, and that One is He from whose Person their authority radiates; in whom, as he says in this same letter, “the old kingdom was being destroyed, God appearing in the form of a man, unto the newness of eternal life.”(156) Again, it is not merely an outward unity of government, but an inward unity of the truth held in common, and also held as given by authority: not truth, as a result of the curiosity of the human intellect, rather truth, as a participation in the mind of Christ. Thus the Catholic unity of government is at the same time a unity of belief, which two unities are not, in fact, separable, for their principle is one in the Person of Christ, in respect of whom submission to the Ruler is one and the same thing with belief in the truth revealed by Him, who is King no less than Word, Word no less than King.