Such a work, therefore, the root and authorisation of which we have been attempting to delineate in this chapter, stretches over the whole field which Truth and Grace occupy, and over all the relations of men which are summed up in what they are to believe and what they are to do. These ramifications are all but endless. But to all these extends that giving of the Holy Ghost in His fourfold character of the Spirit of Unity, Verity, Charity, and Sanctity, which is the result of the Incarnation, and which makes the Church. What we have said here has a special relation to Truth, and to Christian morals as resting upon Christian dogma. But it is impossible to separate Truth from Grace, in their actual operation as powers: faith and charity in the Christian are linked together, as the intellect and the will are one soul. What we have said is but an introduction to a sketch of the great evolution of dogmatic truth through eighteen centuries: but in recording its rise, the secret of its growth, and the source of its strength, it was impossible not to bring out the great fact that Christianity was nothing less than a divine life produced in the world over against the existing heathenism, and laying hold of the whole soul of man, in which, as we have just said, intellect and will are inseparable. It did not consist in anything which individuals believed, however true; but in a society of which Truth and Grace were the joint spring, and it was produced in the midst of a world which had to a great extent forfeited both Truth and Grace, while both returned to it as the gift of Christ assuming man’s nature. This error and distraction of heathenism, and this great unity of Christian life grounded in faith and charity which rose up against it, were profoundly felt by all the Fathers, being eye-witnesses of the old world and the new. Their writings express it again and again, with the vividness which only eye-witnesses, who are likewise actors and sufferers, feel. In nothing, perhaps, do they so differ from modern writers as in the energy with which they appreciate the supernatural character of the Christian, and the wonderful being and endowment of that Christian Body which impressed this character on its members. One cause, we may suppose, of this was the sight of heathenism before them with all its impurities and its impotence to produce good. So they were not even tempted to that naturalism which is the besetting sin of our age and these countries. It would have seemed to them not only an ingratitude but an absurdity to refer to the inborn force of humanity a change equally of the intellect and of the will which they saw to belong only to the power of Christ revealed in His Church. We will cite one such passage as a conclusion to this discussion, and because it represents the whole train of thought which we have been drawing out.(131)