The Church

"And God has set in the Church first apostles, then prophets, then evangelists, then pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ.

So Clement, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, says, word for word, setting out the distinctions of those approved in the Church:

and he kept company with the best of the Chaldeans and the Magi, and his "common hearing-place" hints at what is now so called, the church.

The Church had been, from an early date, in tacit alliance with the Crown.

It was not unnatural that Churchmen should advance new claims, and we find them adopting the watchword, afterwards so famous, “that the Church should be free,” a vague phrase, destined to be embodied in Magna Carta.

attempted to define the position in the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), clause 12 of which provided that in filling vacant Sees the King should summon potiores personas ecclesiae and that the “election” should take place in the King’s chapel with consent of the King and consilio personarum regni, vague words which seem to reserve to Henry the decision as to who constituted “the more influential …

Goodness yet further added delights to man, that, though possessing the whole world, he might dwell in the more pleasant places, transferred into Paradise, even then from the world into the Church.

" This bride Christ fetches for himself, even through Solomon, from the calling of the nations.

if he destines too the church a holy virgin to be assigned to Christ — surely as a bride to a bridegroom — the image cannot be joined to one hostile to the truth of the thing itself.

So they are acceptable to the Church, together with all things, having forgiveness for these matters also through faith in Christ.

Worthily of your own graciousness and zeal, of which I am ever an admirer, you have taken thought for the affairs of the church of the Isaurians.

that, since by the grace of God our agreement in the faith stands firm, there is nothing else that hinders us from being one body and one spirit, as we were called in one hope through our calling.

The provision for the widow was attributable to the exertions of the Church, which never relaxed its solicitude for the interest of wives surviving their husbands—winning, perhaps one of the most arduous of its triumphs when, after exacting for two or three centuries an express promise from the husband at marriage to endow his wife, it at length succeeded in engrafting the principle of Dower on th …

Here, in England, Church influence was certainly chief among the causes which by universal acknowledgment have prevented that discontinuity in the history of Testamentary Law which is sometimes believed to exist in the history of other provinces of Jurisprudence.

On the other hand, the Church, in its anxiety to put a curb on sanguinary ferocity, sought about for authority to punish the graver misdeeds, and found it in those passages of Scripture which speak with approval of the powers of punishment committed to the civil magistrate.

Again, one positive result of the reception by the Brehons of the so-called ‘law of the letter’ appears to have been the development of a great mass of rules relating to the territorial rights of the Church, and these constitute a very interesting department of the Brehon law.

So far as the published tracts afford materials for an opinion, I am inclined to think that the influence of the Roman law has been very slight, and to attribute it not to study of the writings of the Roman lawyers, but to contact with Churchmen imbued more or less with Roman legal notions.

and there is a constant transfer of lands to the Church, and an intimate intermixture of tribal rights with ecclesiastical rights.

But this is read in the Church, and pronounced in the Church, and the Church is a virgin!

that he begs it of God alone, that he does not believe human peace sufficient for his offence, that he prefers to blush before the Church rather than to communicate with it.

Likewise the parable of the drachma, as provoked from the same matter, we equally interpret of the heathen — even though it is lost in the house, as it were in the Church, even though it is found by the light of a lamp, as it were by the word of God.

From the authority of the Empire and the Church, no longer effectual as an international agency, Grotius appeals to Humanity as furnishing the true law of nations.

But there have been some, who have asserted the rights of the church over unknown parts of the world, though the Apostle Paul himself has expressly said that Christians were not to judge those who were without the pale of their own community.

Christ himself, the spring, from whence all the power of the church was derived, and whose life is the model for the church to follow, said, his kingdom was not of this world, that is, was not of the same nature, with other kingdoms, otherwise, like the rest of sovereigns, he would have maintained his authority by the power of the sword.

The second caution is that, in claiming justice for our pagan ancestors, I have no desire to be less than just to the Church.

That persistence was in some respects reinforced by the teaching of the Christian church after the conversion of the Roman empire;

It was written of the Church that kings should be her nursing fathers.

a monogamist I presume him to be, through the Church, which, built upon him, was about to set every grade of its order among monogamists.

But if you are not equal to that, he meets you as a monogamist in the spirit, having one Church as his bride, after the figure of Adam and Eve, which the apostle interprets as that great mystery, "in Christ and the Church," befitting the carnal monogamy through the spiritual.

A Christian, of course, will seek heirs, himself disinherited of the whole world!

Who the ravening wolves, but treacherous minds and spirits, lurking within to infest the flock of Christ?

If this is so, it is established likewise that all teaching which agrees with those apostolic Churches, the mother-wombs and originals of the faith, is to be reckoned to the truth, as undoubtedly holding that which the Churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God;

Straightway, therefore, the apostles — whom this appellation interprets as "the sent" — having by lot taken a twelfth, Matthias, into the place of Judas, on the authority of the prophecy which is in the psalm of David, and having received the promised power of the Holy Spirit for miracles and for utterance, first throughout Judaea, having attested their faith in Jesus Christ and founded Churches, …

The Church, as such, must be disestablished and disendowed;

On these points, and on the maintenance of a Church establishment, public opinion seems to be pretty evenly balanced.

Grundy, is superior to that of the Church at the very height of its intellectual development.

And this prevention was, in Southey’s judgment, to be effected by the moral authority of the Church and the action of the State.

The Church, it may be added, has repeatedly relaxed the ‘exogamous’ rule which forbids the intermarriage of near kin in order to save a member of a great Continental House from having to transgress the outer limit within which he is bound to marry.

Whence shall we suffice to tell the felicity of that marriage which the church brings about, and the oblation confirms, and the blessing seals, the angels report, and the Father holds ratified?

How much second marriages detract from faith, how much they clamour against holiness, the discipline of the church and the apostle's ruling declare, since it does not allow the twice-married to preside, and does not grant that a widow be enrolled in the order unless she has been the wife of one husband.

The dust of the schools and the tyranny of the Church are thrown off, and the classical ideal of a free and noble humanity gains enthusiastic adherents.

The indifference and hostility to the Church which have been cited among the prominent characteristics of modern philosophy, do not necessarily mean enmity to the Christian religion, much less to religion in general.

If up to this time Church dogma had ruled unchallenged in spiritual affairs, and the Aristotelian philosophy in things temporal, war is now declared against authority of every sort and freedom of thought is inscribed on the banner.

Nay, even what is rightful the flesh does not lose, thanks to the care of the Church and the love of the brethren;

Among the nourishments of the flesh, blessed martyrs elect, which our lady mother the Church furnishes you in prison from her breasts, and which the brethren one by one supply from their own resources, accept also something from us that may serve to nourish the spirit as well.

For, turned from the Christians to the philosophers, from the Church to the Academy and the Porch, he took from there, from the Stoics, the notion of setting Matter alongside the Lord — Matter which, on his view, has itself always existed, neither born nor made, having no beginning at all nor end, out of which the Lord afterwards made all things.

But the Acts of the Apostles do not so teach, in that outcry of the Church to God:

And since under three both the testimony of faith and the pledge of salvation are guaranteed, the mention of the Church is necessarily added, since where the three are — that is, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — there is the Church, which is the body of the three.

For the rest, that little boat presented a figure of the Church, in that it is disquieted on the sea — that is, in the world — by the waves, that is, by persecutions and temptations, the Lord through patience as it were sleeping, until, roused at the last by the prayers of the saints, he checks the world and restores tranquillity to his own.

For just as, after the waters of the flood, by which the ancient iniquity was purged, after the baptism, so to speak, of the world, a dove, the herald of the heavenly anger laid aside, announced peace to the earth, being sent forth from the ark and returning with the olive — a sign which even among the nations is held forth for peace — by the same disposition, by a spiritual effect, the dove of th …

Israel was outside in them, while the new disciples, hearing and believing within, clinging to Christ, were marking out the Church, which he named the preferable mother and the worthier brotherhood, the fleshly kindred being refused.

"and another of the moon" — that is, of the church;

The authority of the Church has constituted the difference between the order and the people, and the honour hallowed through the joint session of the order.

But when the apostle interprets it of the Church and Christ, They shall be two in one flesh — according to the spiritual marriage of the Church and Christ (for Christ is one, and his Church one) — we ought to recognize that the law of one marriage has been doubled and heightened for us, both according to the foundation of the race and according to the sacrament of Christ.

Which never happens more than when in persecution the Church is forsaken by the clergy.

This is that winnowing-fan which even now purges the Lord's threshing-floor—the Church, namely—winnowing the confused heap of the faithful and separating the wheat of the martyrs from the chaff of the deniers;