All that his country is to the patriot, the Church is to the Christian, but in so much higher a degree, as the object for which Christ came is above the needs and cares of this present life. Has the City of God, then, less claim upon Christians than the City of Romulus had upon Romans? Thus, in the natural duty of the citizen, as well as in the compound nature of man, is contained a reminder of the Christian’s relation to the Church, and a picture and ensample of the Church’s authority. Thirdly, there is the analogy presented by the transmission of natural life(105) through the one flesh of Adam to all his race. As the breath of natural life, once given to Adam, is continued on to all those sprung from his body, the power of the Creator never starting anew, but working in and through the trunk of human nature; so the supernatural life springing from our Lord, as the gift of His Incarnation, is breathed on the day of Pentecost into the whole Body of the Church to be communicated from that Body for ever. Christ is to the one exactly what Adam is to the other. As the Word of God, creating, joined to the inheritance of the flesh of Adam from generation to generation the communication of a spirit such as Adam’s, by which double action we have the unity of race, so the Word of God, redeeming, when He had taken our flesh as the first-fruits of human nature, breathed forth from that flesh the communication of His Spirit to the Body of the Church, by which we belong to the race of the Incarnate God, and are become His family, and make His house. Thus that which the body of Adam is naturally, the Body of Christ is spiritually, and the descent of human nature in its unity a picture of the Holy Spirit’s unity working through the Body which He has chosen. And this analogy is made the more striking by the statement so often repeated in the Greek Fathers, that with the natural life, as first given to Adam, was conjoined the gift of the Holy Ghost, forfeited afterwards by his sin, and withdrawn from him and his race, and now restored as the special gift of the Incarnate God.(106) Thus the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost is a true and real counterpart of the creation of man in Eden; but they who share it are become kindred of God through His flesh, and by so sharing it together, they form that society which failed through Adam’s sin. In the first creation, the Omnipotent Creator, in His bounty towards His favourite child, as foreseeing the assumption of that nature by Himself, attached to the gift of natural life the Spirit of sanctification; in the second, having assumed that nature, He gave through His own Body, first taken out of us, then crucified, now risen and exalted, the gift of the Spirit, Who, with all the endowments springing from Him, as the Inspirer of truth and charity, of unity and holiness, dwells in that Body for ever.