weaknesses, and folly, but with a most perfect foreknowledge of every
circumstance and event, actual and to come. He spoke and ordered and
arranged all things, with His eyes clearly fixed on the most remote
ages, no less than on the present and the actual. _We_ mortals write
history after the characters have already lived and died, and when
nations have already developed and run their course. But with Christ,
the whole history of man, his wars and his conquests, his vices and
his virtues, his religious opinions and doctrines, had been already
written and completed, down to the very last line of the very last
chapter, an eternity before He assumed our nature and founded His
Church. It was with this most intimate knowledge before Him, that He
promised to provide us with a reliable and infallible teacher, who
should safeguard His doctrine, and publish the glad tidings of the
Gospel, throughout all time, even unto the consummation of the world.
Since it is God Who promises, it follows, with all the rigour of
logic, that this fearless Witness and living Teacher must be a _fact_,
not a _figment_; a stupendous reality, not a mere name; One, in a
word, possessing and wielding the self-same authority as Himself, and
to be received and obeyed and accepted as Himself: "Who heareth you
heareth Me" (Luke x. 16).

This teacher was to be a supreme court of appeal, and a tribunal,
before which every case could be tried, and definitely settled, once
for all. And since this tribunal was a divine creation, and invested
by God Himself with supernatural powers for that specific purpose, it
must be fully equipped, and thoroughly competent and equal to its
work. For God always adapts means to ends. Hence it can never
resemble the tribunals existing in man-made churches, which can but
mutter empty phrases, suggest compromises, and clothe thought in
wholly ambiguous language--tribunals that dare not commit themselves