One office remains; His office of King. And here, again, the jurisdiction which He created for His kingdom springs from His Person, and that not only in its origin but in its perpetual derivation. He was Himself(288) the Apostle: as such He first multiplied Himself in the Twelve, whom from Himself He named Apostles. His public life on earth is an image of the whole mission or government which He would set up after His ascension. He lives with the Twelve: He teaches them: He is their Instructor, Father, and Friend. When His Apostles afterwards created Bishops, this form of our Lord’s life on earth was exactly reproduced in the earliest dioceses. Thus S. Mark went forth from the side of Peter, and the mode of his living, and the family which he drew around him at Alexandria was after this pattern. He, the Bishop, is the image of Christ, and his twelve presbyters of the Apostles. This model is continually set forth by S. Ignatius as a divine command and institution, he being himself the occupant of the great Mother See of the East, the third See of Peter, and that wherein he first sat.(289) Thus the canonical life was formed by the exactest imitation of our Lord’s public life, and its reproduction throughout the various dioceses formed the Church. Such was the life which S. Augustine afterwards practised and reduced to rule; and those who planted the Christian Faith throughout the north, Apostles to new and barbarous races, had this model before them. The diocese was first a family, in which the Bishop as a father presided over his priests, and sent them forth to their work. The Eucharist which he consecrated was from the beginning dispensed from his church to all his flock. The diocese, then, in its earliest form was an image of our Lord’s intercourse with the Twelve, wherein the Bishop represents Him, and the priesthood His Apostles. But the whole Church in its episcopate or mass of dioceses no less represented that His public life. For as He was the Head, the Living Teacher and Guide of His Apostles, and as He came to establish one Kingdom, and one only,(290) wherein the Twelve represented the whole Episcopate, and contained in themselves its powers, so the Primacy which He visibly exercised among them, He delegated, when He left them, to one of their number. Peter, when he received that commission to feed His sheep, took the place on earth of the great Shepherd, and in him the flock remains one. Thus the double power which expresses the divinely-established government of the Church, the Primacy and the Episcopate, is as close a transcript of the Lord’s life on earth with His Apostles as the diocese taken by itself. In His intercourse with His Apostles He is the germ of the Bishop with his priests; in His Vicariate bestowed upon Peter He repeats or rather continues His visible Headship on earth.