f of the
Catholic Church, this Father of kings and of nations, this successor of the
fisherman Peter, he lives, he raises among men his brow, charged with a
triple crown, and the sacred weight of eighteen centuries; the ambassadors
of nations are at his court: he sends forth his ministers to every
creature, and even to places which have not yet a name. When from the
windows of his palace he gazes abroad, his sight discovers the most
illustrious horizon in the world, the earth trodden by the Romans, the city
they had built with the spoils of the universe, the centre of things under
their two principal forms, matter and spirit: where all nations have
passed; all glories have come: all cultivated imaginations have at least
made a pilgrimage from far: Rome, the tomb of Martyrs and Apostles, the
home of all recollections. And when the Pontiff stretches forth his arms to
bless it, together with the world which is inseparable from it, he can bear
a witness to himself which no sovereign shall ever bear, that he has
neither built nor conquered, nor received his city, but that he is its
inmost and enduring life, that he is in it like the blood in the heart of
man, and that right can go no further than this, a continuous generation
which would make the parricide a suicide." Such feelings as these are what
any Churchman must habitually entertain, who looks on the Roman Pontiff as
at once the governing power and the life of the Church. Could, then, St.
Chrysostom have beheld in Rome the Church's heart, whence her life-blood
courses over the whole body, and have seen no reason to love her for that?
or have stated that she was more remarkable for possessing even the bodies
of the blessed Apostles than for all other things together? What Roman
Catholic would so speak now? The power of the Roman Pontiff in the Latin
Communion is actually such, that Lacordaire's words respecting the city of
Rome apply to the whole Church; to destroy that power would be to destroy
the Church herself; the parricide would be a suicide. But how can this
dogma be imposed upon us as necessary to salvation, if St. Augustin, St.
Chrysostom, and the Church of their day knew it not? or let it be shown us,
how any men who did know it, could either have written as they write, or
have been silent as they are silent.

We may sum up St. Augustin's view of the relation of the Roman Pontiff to
his brother Bishops in his own beautiful words to Pope Boniface: "To sit on
our