3. Again, to take another image, which is the greatest of realities. What a wonderful production of divine skill is the structure of the human body! Even its outward beauty is such as to sway our feelings with a force which reason has at times a hard combat to overcome, so keen is the delight which it conveys. But the inward distribution of its parts is so marvellous that those who have spent their lives in the study of its anatomy can find in a single member, for instance, in the hand, enough out of which to fill a volume with the wise adaptation of means to ends which it reveals. There are parts of it the structure of which is so minute and subtle that the most persevering science has not yet attained fully to unravel their use. In all this arrangement of nerves and muscles, machines of every sort, meeting all manner of difficulties, and supplying all kinds of uses, what an endless storehouse of wisdom and forethought! And all these are permeated by a common life, which binds every part, whatever its several importance, into one whole, and all these, in the state of health, work together with so perfect an ease that the living actor, the bearer of so marvellous a structure, is unconscious of an effort, and exults in the life so simple and yet so manifold poured out on such a multitude of members, a life so tender that the smallest prick is felt over the whole body, and yet so strong that a wound may transfix the whole structure leaving the life untouched. And, in addition to this physical marvel, the incorporeal mind, which has its seat in this material structure, and whose presence is itself its life, rules like an absolute monarch with undisputed sway over his whole dominion, so that the least movement of volition carries with it a willing obedience in the whole frame, and for it instantaneously the eye gazes, the ear listens, the tongue speaks, the feet walk, the hands work, and the brain feels with an incomparable unity. The marvel of the body is that things so many and various by the rule of the artificer impressed upon them are yet one, concur to one end, and produce one whole, from which no part can be taken, and to which none can be added without injury, the least and the greatest replete with one life, which so entirely belongs to the whole body that what is severed from the body at once dies. “Now as the body is one, and has many members, but all the members of this one body, being many, are one body, so also,” says S. Paul, “is Christ,” giving the name of the Head to the whole Body. What the human head is to its own body, that our Lord is to His Church. Perhaps no other image in the whole realm of nature would convey with such force the three relations(70) which constitute spiritual headship, an inseparable union, by which the head and the body form one whole, an unceasing government, including every sort of provision and care, and a perpetual influx of grace. This is on the part of the head, while as to the body