The Church and Her Attributes [pp. 788-803]

The Church and her Attributes.
ted to Him, and are in Him as their
head, as we were in Adam; and
hence the dogma, extra ecclesiam
nzilla salus, judged by the world to
be so harsh and illiberal, is founded
in the very nature and design of the
church, of the whole mediatorial
work of Christ, and in the very rea son of the incarnation itself. To say a
man can be saved out of the church,
is saying simply a man can be saved
out of Christ, without being born of
Him,-as impossible as for one to be
a man and in humanity, without being born of Adam. The justice, the
sanctity, the merits, the life of Christ,
can be really ours, only as we are
really assimilated to His body, and
are in Him as our living head, our
Father in the order of grace; and
hence it was not idly or inconsiderately, that St. Cyprian, one of the
profoundest of the fathers, said:
"He cannot have God for his father,
who has not the church for his mother." It lies in the very nature of
the case.
The other sacraments are channels
of grace from the head to the body
and its members; and are all means
of sustaining or restoring the life begotten in baptism, preserving, diffusing, or defending the faith, bringing
up children in the nurture of the
Lord, augmenting the life and compacting the union of the body of
Christ, and solacing individuals in
their illnesses, and comforting and
strengthening souls in their passage
through the dark valley of death.
The sacramental syslem is complete,
and provides for all our spiritual
wants. Baptism initiates us into the
life of Christ; the Holy Eucharist
nourishes that life in us; Penance
restores it when lost by sin; Confirmation gives strength and heroic
courage to withstand and repel the
assaults of Satan; Orders provide
priests for offering the unbloody sa
crifice, the stewards of the myste ries of Christ, intercessors for the
people, teachers, directors, and de fenders, in the name of Christ, of
the Christian society; Matrimony
institutes and blesses the Christian
family; and Extreme Unction heals
the sick, or sustains, strengthens, and
consoles the departing. Indeed, the
sacraments meet all the necessities
of the soul, in both the natural and
the supernatural orders, from its birth
to its departure, and even leave us
not on the brink of the grave, but
accompany us till received into the
choir of the just made perfect.
The medium of all sacramental
grace is the Man Christ Jesus, the
Word made flesh, and the sacraments
are the media through which the
grace oI our Lord Jesus Christ flows
out from him, the Fountain, -the
grace that begets the new life, justifies, sanctifies, and makes pleasing
to God, we mean,-is infused by the
Holy Ghost into the soul, and constitutes alike the vital principle of
the individual, and of the whole body,
quickening and sustaining each. In
rejecting sacramental grace, the heterodox separate the individual soul,
and also the church herself, from all
real communion or intercourse with
Christ, or God in his human nature,
and accept the seminal principle of
rationalism, into which we see them
everywhere falling. They dissolve
Christ, and render the Word efficient
only in his divine nature. The sacraments are the media of our union
with God in his human nature,
through which the hypostatic union
is, in some sort, repeated in us, or
made by the Holy Ghost practically
effectual to the justice and sanctity
of believers, and the perfecting of the
church, which is the body of Christ;
and as this grace, in its principle and
medium, is Christ himself, all who
are born of it are born of him, and
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