Page:The Church, by John Huss.pdf/37

Rh those, not in communion with the visible church, are lost. The church was looked upon as a tangible, palpable institution, as much so as the duchy of Spoleto or the kingdom of France. The Schoolman, who came nearest giving a definition, was Hugo of St. Victor who, in his work on the sacraments, called the holy catholic church the body of Christ vivified by one Spirit, united in one faith and sanctified. It is the number of the faithful, the totality of all Christians. Thomas Aquinas passed it by except as he discussed the pope's absolute supremacy. The fourth Lateran indeed spoke of the church as "the one universal church of the faithful outside of which there cannot be any salvation"—extra quam nullus omnino salvatur—a statement which narrowed the church down to the limits of the Roman communion in the profession demanded of the Waldenses, namely, "we believe with the heart and confess that the one church is not of the heretics but the holy Roman catholic church outside of which no one can be saved."

In his Rule of Princes and Errors of the Greeks, Thomas Aquinas gave his assent to Innocent III's assumption claiming for the Roman pontiff plenitude of power and declared that obedience was due to the Roman church as to the Lord Jesus himself—cui obediendum est tanquam Domino Deo, Jesu. He used also the words: "subjection to the Roman pontiff is of necessity to salvation"—subesse romano pontifici est de necessitate salutis.

A new period in the history of the conception of the church opened with Boniface's bull, Unam sanctam, and was forced by it, the text on which other writers as well as Wyclif and Huss comment frequently. This notorious document might have been relegated to the archives of innocuous legal