he
essential wisdom of Peter, Paul, John, and any other apostle or seer, or
any other thing or creature, as the ocean includes the water of many
rivers. In the darkest times of dissension, uncertainty or suffering,
the Christian East did not rely so much upon the great apostles, either
Peter, or Paul, or John, but looked beyond time and space to the Eternal
Christ, The Logos of God, and asked for Light. And it looked to Eternity
through this church in Constantinople, St Sophia, as the all-embracing
and all-reconciling, holy symbol. Whenever Peter, or Paul, or John, or
any other apostle, or prophet, became the ground upon which the
believers quarrelled, it was in the Holy Wisdom that they sought refuge
and healing from their intellectual one-sidedness and ill-will.

Yet if Holy Wisdom has only in the East a magnificent visible symbol,
Holy Wisdom is none the less the very foundation, substance and aim of
the Western Church as well as of the Eastern, yea of the one, holy
Catholic Church. For Christianity had been destined neither for the East
alone nor for the West alone, but for the whole globe. And what means
the so-much abused word Catholic if not inclusiveness? Even such is,
too, the meaning of the Divine wisdom as revealed in Christianity from
the beginning.

I will try to show this inclusive wisdom of the Church, revealed from
the beginning, Firstly in the Church's Founder, Secondly in the Church's
organisation, and Thirdly in the Church's destination.

THE INCLUSIVE WISDOM OF THE CHURCH'S FOUNDER

By His birth He included and bound together the lowest and the highest,
the natural and the supernatural: stable, manger, straw, sheep and
shepherds on the one hand; stars, angels, magi and Davidic royal origin
on the other.

By His life He included the austerity of the Indian monks, of John the
Baptist and the Nazarenes on the one hand; and on the other the
Confucian moderate feasting, in the houses of friends, at the marriage
feast and on other solemn occasions.

His life-drama was interwoven into the lives of all classes of people:
men, women and children, Judaists and heathen, King Herod and the
proconsul Pilate, priests and soldiers, merchants and beggars, learned
sophists and ignorant fools, the sick and the healthy, the righteous and
the sinful, Jews and Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, and all others who
could be met in Palestine, the very market of races and creeds.

He was by no means a