its consequences with it, a law stated briefly in the commandment _Thou
shall not kill_. But our Divine Lord revealed more of the workings of
this law than men had hitherto recognized. _I say unto you_, declared
Christ, _that whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer._ He revealed,
that is to say, the fact that this law runs even in the realm of
thought, that the hating spirit incurs the guilt and punishment of
murder, and not merely the murderous action. Were men less free when
they learned that fact? Not unless I am less free than I was before,
when I learn for the first time that lightning kills. Christ came, then,
to reveal the _Truth that makes us free_, and He does so by informing
our intellects and enabling us to _bring into captivity every
understanding to _His obedience_.

(ii) Turn now to the Catholic Church. Here is a Society whose function
it is to preserve and apply the teaching of Christ; to analyze it and to
state it in forms or systems which every generation can receive. For
this purpose, then, she draws up not merely a Creed--which is the
systematic statement of the Christian Revelation--but disciplinary rules
and regulations that will make this Creed and the life that is
conformable to it more easy of realization, and all this she does with
the express object of enabling the individual soul to respond to her
spiritual environment and to rise to the full exercise of her powers and
rights. As the scientist and the statesmen take, respectively, the great
laws of nature and society and reduce them to rules and codes, yet
without adding or taking away from these facts, that are true whether
they are popularly recognized or not--and all with the purpose not of
diminishing but of increasing the general liberty--so the Church,
divinely safeguarded too in the process, takes the Revelation of Christ
and by her dogma and her discipline popularizes it, so to speak, and
makes it at once comprehensible and effective.