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ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
their harmony. The Church can neither submit as a whole to the influence of a particular people, nor impose on one the features or the habits of another; for she is exalted in her catholicity above the differences of race, and above the claims of political power. At once the most firm and the most flexible institution in the world , she is all things to all nations-educating each in her own spirit, \vithout violence to its nature, and assimilating it to herself without prejudice to the originality of its native character. Whilst she thus trañsforms them, not "- by reducing them to a uniform type, but by raising them towards a common elevation, she receives from them services in return. Each healthy and vigorous nation that is converted is a dynamic as well as a numerical increase in the resources of the Church, by bringing an accession of new and peculiar qualities, as well as of quantity and numbers. So far from seeking sameness, or flourishing only in one atmosphere, she is enriched and strengthened by all the varieties of national character and intellect In the mission of the Catholic Church, each nation has its function, which its own position and nature indicate and enable it to fulfil. Thus the extinct nations of antiquity survive in the beneficial action they continue to exert \vithin her, and she still feels and ackno\vledges the influence of the African or of the Cappadocian mind. The condition of this immunity from the predominant influence of national and political divisions, and of this indifference to the attachment of particular States and races,-the security of unity and universality,-consists in the existence of a single, supreme, independent head. The primacy is the bulwark, or rather the corner-stone, of Catholicism; without it, there would be as many churches as there are nations or States. Not one of those who have denounced the Papacy as a usurpation has ever attempted to sho\v that the condition which its absence necessarily involves is theological1y desirable, or that it is the will of God. It remains the most radical and con- spicuous distinction between the Catholic Church and the sects. Those \vho attempt to do without it are cOlnpelled
