istendom, from the
Apostles' time till now, whatever their later divisions into Latin,
Greek, and Anglican. I have explained this view of the subject above at
pp. 69-71 of this Volume. When then I speak, in the particular Sermon
before us, of the members, or the rulers, or the action of "the Church,"
I mean neither the Latin, nor the Greek, nor the English, taken by
itself, but of the whole Church as one body: of Italy as one with
England, of the Saxon or Norman as one with the Caroline Church. _This_
was specially the one Church, and the points in which one branch or one
period differed from another were not and could not be Notes of the
Church, because Notes necessarily belong to the whole of the Church
every where and always.

This being my doctrine as to the relation of the Church to the world, I
laid down in the Sermon three principles concerning it, and there left
the matter. The first is, that Divine Wisdom had framed for its action
laws, which man, if left to himself, would have antecedently pronounced
to be the worst possible for its success, and which in all ages have
been called by the world, as they were in the Apostles' days,
"foolishness;" that man ever relies on physical and material force, and
on carnal inducements as Mahomet with his sword and his houris, or
indeed almost as that theory of religion, called, since the Sermon was
written, "muscular Christianity;" but that our Lord, on the contrary,
has substituted meekness for haughtiness, passiveness for violence, and
innocence for craft: and that the event has shown the high wisdom of
such an economy, for it has brought to light a set of natural laws,
unknown before, by which the seeming paradox that weakness should be
stronger than might, and simplicity than worldly policy, is readily
explained.

Secondly, I said that men of the world, judging by the event, and not
recognizing the secret causes of the success, viz. a higher order of
natural laws,--natural, though their source and action were
supernatural, (for "the meek inherit the earth," by means of a meekness
which comes from above,)--these men, I say, concluded, that the success
which they witnessed must arise from some evil secret which the world
had not mastered,--by means of magic, as they said in the first ages, by
cunning as they say now. And accordingly they thought that the humility
and inoffensiveness of Christians, or of Churchmen, was a mere pretence
and blind to cover the real causes o