question her authority and compete for the right to rule over their
fellow-Christians with a confidence as unshaken as hers. The
Greek Orthodox Church regards Rome herself as schismatic and
heretical. The rival sects of Protestantism may differ in many
things; they share the conviction that they have preserved the
pure and unadulterated Gospel from the corruption of Rome.

A further difficulty with the Roman solution is the inability of
the churches that adopt it to show any such monopoly of the Chris-
tian virtues as would seem to justify their claim. If the reason
we require an infallible Church is that it is our only means of
delivery from the effects of human sin and ignorance, then we should
expect to find the Church which possesses this unique revelation il-
lustrating in an exceptional degree the Christian qualities which
divine revelation was designed to produce; but no such demonstra-
tion can be given. In the court of morals no church can lay claim
to a monopoly of the virtues, nor can all the churches together
deny to those outside some share at least in the faith and love
which are the choicest possessions of the Christian. The Church, as
Roman theologians have long ago clearly perceived, is a corpus
permixtum--including in its membership good and evil, saint and
sinner. Like every human institution, it depends for its success
upon the men and women who administer it, and these--in the
Church as in the state--are fallible and sinful. ¹ Dante, good
Catholic as he was, found room for more than one Pope in hell.
Harnack, from the Protestant side, has summed up his view of the
situation in the pregnant sentence: "Where there is a church, there
is always a little bit of the world!"

Confronted with these facts, the extreme liberals discard alto-
gether the idea of one outward visible church. They believe that
the true Church, the Church of the New Testament, is an invisible
and spiritual thing. It is the fellowship of believers, the company
of all the men and women who share Christ's ideal and are working
for His ends. This society has no fixed limits. It is not confined
to any ecclesiastical organization, nor to all of them together. It
is like the spirit in the human body--an inward presence, felt

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