Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

104 THE FIRST AND THE SECOND MAN.us to belong to Himself; consecrated on His owntable the mystery of our peace and unity. Hewho receives the mystery of unity and holds notthe bond of peace receives not a mystery for himself,' but a witness against O himself."35Thus the coherence of the natural and mysticalBody of Christ was at once exhibited andeffected in the great central act of Christian worship,and the whole fruit of the Incarnation wasseen springing from the Person of Christ, andbestowed on men as His members in the unityof one Body. Thus were they taken out of theisolation, distraction, and enmity-that state ofmutual strife and disorder which heathendom expresses-andmade into the one divine commonwealth; and thus the Body of Christ grows to itsfull stature and perfect form through all the agesof Christendom.And if there be one conviction which, /ther with the belief in the Incarnation itself ofthe Word,"is common to all the Fathers, Doctors,Saints, and Martyrs of the Church-which togetherwith that belief and as part of it is the groundof their confidence in trouble, of their perseverancein enduring, of their undoubting faith intimes of persecution, of their assurance of finalvictory, it is the sense which encompassed theirwhole life, that they were members of one Body,which, in virtue of an organic unity in itself and35 S, Aug. serm. 272, torn. v. p. 1104 c.