o
admit, that there is one holy Catholic Church, commit a suicidal act in
denying the Primacy as acknowledged by the Church at the Council of
Chalcedon. For such a denial destroys the authority of the Church herself
both in doctrine and discipline for all subsequent time. If the Church, in
declaring St. Leo to be entrusted by our Lord with the guardianship of the
Vine, erred; if she asserted a falsehood, or if she favoured an usurpation,
how can she be trusted for any maintenance of doctrine, for any
administration of sacraments, for any exercise of authority? This
consideration does not touch those who believe in no Church at all. They
are in the position of that individual whom the great Constantine
recommended to take a ladder and mount to heaven by himself. But it touches
all who profess to believe in an episcopate, in councils, in sacraments, in
an organised Church, in authority deposited in that Church, and, finally,
in history and in historical Christianity. To all such it may surely be
said, as the simplest enunciation of reasoning, that they cannot profess
belief in the Church which the Creed proclaims while they accept or reject
its authority as they please. Or to localise a general expression: A man
does not follow the doctrine of St. Augustine if he accepts his
condemnation of Pelagius, but denies that unity of the Church in
maintaining which St. Augustine spent his forty years of teaching. The
action of all such persons in the eyes of the world without amounts to
this, that by denying the Primacy they disprove the existence of the
Church. Their negation goes to the profit of total unbelief. Asserters of
the Church's division are pioneers of infidelity, for who can believe in
what has fallen? or is the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ a kingdom
divided against itself? They who maintain schism generate agnostics.

But I was prevented on a former occasion by want of space from dwelling
with due force upon some circumstances of St. Leo's life. These are such as
to make his time an era. I was occupied during a whole volume with the
attempt to set forth in some sort the action of St. Peter's See upon the
Greek and Roman world from the day of Pentecost to the complete recognition
of the Universal Pastorship of Peter as inherited by the Roman Pontiff in
the person of St. Leo.

I approach now a further development of this subject. I go forward to treat
of the Papacy, deprived of all temporal support from the fall of