Every one who partakes of Him, partakes likewise of his chrism, because Christ is the head of the Church, and the Church and Christ one Body.(279) We have here in Origen’s thought one and the same divine power, proceeding forth from the Incarnation, which forms first the Body of the Lord, and then gathers into this Body every individual as a copy of the Christ. The heathen scoffer had objected: why send forth one spirit into one corner of the earth? It was needed to breathe that spirit into many bodies, and to send them forth into all the world. Nay, replied Origen, “the whole Church of God—animated by the Son of God as the soul quickens and moves the body—was enough. It needed not that there should be many bodies and many souls, like that of Jesus, in the way you suppose, for the one Word as the sun of righteousness rising from Judea was sufficient to send forth rays that should reach every soul that would receive him.” He has done far more than you suggest: every member of that one Body has received according to his measure a due portion of anointment: after the model of the Christ, they too are Christs; “so that beginning in the body He should dawn in power and in spirit upon the universe of souls which would no longer be destitute of God.” In Origen’s mind, then, the greatness of the King lies specifically in this, that out of confusion He draws unity, out of those who were no people He forms a people, out of nations and tribes at enmity He moulds an indivisible kingdom, and from His own Body a Body which shall embrace a universe of souls, instinct with one life, and that His own. This was Origen’s view of the work and triumph of Christ, as he saw it before him, at the eve of the great Decian persecution in 249.