Page:The Church, by John Huss.pdf/59

Rh house of God, as Augustine in his Exposition of the Creed says, but they should believe that the catholic church is the bride of the Lord Jesus Christ—bride, I say, chaste, incorrupt, and never capable of being corrupted. For St. Cyprian, the bishop and glorious martyr, 24: 1, C. Loquitur (Friedberg, 1: 971, de Unitate Eccles., 5; Ante-Nic. Fathers, 5: 423], says: "The church is one, which is spread abroad far and wide by the increase of her fruitfulness." And he adds: "nevertheless the head is one, the origin is one, and one is the copious mother of fruitfulness. The bride of Christ cannot be defiled. She is incorrupt and chaste. She knows one house and guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one couch." The holy church is also the husbandman's vineyard, of which Gregory in his Homilies [Migne, 76: 1154] says: "Our Maker has a vineyard, namely the universal church, which starts from righteous Abel and goes down to the last elect person who shall be born in the end of the world, which bears as many saints as the vineyard sends forth branches." Of the church St. Remigius also says in his Homily Quadragesima on the text: "'The men of Nineveh shall rise up in judgment with this generation and condemn it.' The holy church is made up of two parts, those who have not sinned and those who have ceased to sin." St. Isidore also, in speaking of the church, de Summo Bono, 14 [Migne, 83: 572] says: "The holy