the episcopal testimony would be destroyed if under any circumstances the whole body fell into heresy.
III. The Indefectibility of the Faith in individual members is closely connected with the external and social Indefectibility of the Church. The two stand to each as cause and effect, and act and react on each other. The interior Faith of individual members, even of the Pope and the Bishops, may fail; but it is impossible for the Faith to fail in the whole mass. The Infallibility and Indefectibility of the Church and of the Faith require on the part of the Head, that by means of his legislative and judicial power the law of Faith should be always infallibly proposed; but this does not require the infallibility and indefectibility of his own interior Faith and of his extrajudicial utterances. On the part of the Teaching Body as a whole, there is directly required merely that it should not fail collectively, which, of course, supposes that it does not err universally in its internal Faith. Lastly, on the part of the Body of the Faithful, it is directly and absolutely required that their inner Faith (sensus et virtus fidei) should never fail entirely, and also that the external profession should never be universally wrong.
The whole doctrine of the Organization of the Teaching Apostolate may be summarized as follows. The teaching function bound up with the two fundamental powers of the Hierarchy, Orders and Jurisdiction, fulfils all the requirements and attains all the purposes for which it was instituted. It transmits and enforces Revelation, and brings about unity and universality of Faith. It is a highly developed organism, with the members acting in perfect harmony, wherein the Holy Ghost operates, and whereby He gives manifold testimony to revealed truth, at the same time upholding and strengthening the action of individuals by means of the reciprocal action and reaction of the different organs. Just as God spoke to our fathers through the Prophets before the coming of Christ,” at sundry times and in divers manners” (Heb. 1:1), so now does Jesus Christ speak to us at sundry times and in divers manners in the Church “which is His body, and the fulness of Him Who is filled all in all” (Eph. 1:23).
