as that were before so wavering, and which shall contain some
machinery for formulating such agreements as may be come to. The common
religious sense of the world is thus organized, and its conclusions
registered. We have no longer the wavering _dreams_ of men; we have
instead of them the constant _vision_ of man.

Now in such a universal parliament we see what the Church of Rome
essentially is, viewed from her natural side. She is ideally, if not
actually, the parliament of the believing world. Her doctrines, as she
one by one unfolds them, emerge upon us like petals from a half-closed
bud. They are not added arbitrarily from without; they are developed
from within. They are the flowers contained from the first in the bud of
our moral consciousness. When she formulates in these days something
that has not been formulated before, she is no more enunciating a new
truth than was Newton when he enunciated the theory of gravitation.
Whatever truths, hitherto hidden, she may in the course of time grow
conscious of, she holds that these were always implied in her teaching,
though before she did not know it; just as gravitation was implied in
many ascertained facts that men knew well enough long before they knew
that it was implied in them. Thus far, then, the Church of Rome
essentially is the spiritual sense of humanity, speaking to men through
its proper and only possible organ. Its intricate machinery, such as its
systems of representation, its methods of voting, the appointment of its
speaker, and the legal formalities required in the recording of its
decrees, are things accidental only; or if they are necessary, they are
necessary only in a secondary way.

But the picture of the Church thus far is only half drawn. She is all
this, but she is something more than this. She is not only the
parliament of spiritual man, but she is such a parliament guided by the
Spirit of God. The work of that Spirit may be secret, and to the natural
eyes untraceable, as the work of the human will is in the human brain.
But none the less it is there.

_Totam infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet._

The analogy of the human brain is here of great help to us. The human
brain is an arrangement of material particles which can become connected
with consciousness only in virtue of such a special arrangement. The
Church is theoretically an arrangement of individuals which can become
connected with th