pay to it the material gifts due, such as oblations and tithes, and in consequence inordinate confusion would follow in the church militant.
Here, by way of denying the antecedent statement, it is said: An instance is furnished in the case of Judas, chosen for the service of the episcopate by Christ, who could not err. For that reprobate never was Christ's true disciple, as Augustine shows, but a wolf clad in sheep's clothing, and he was always chaff and a grain of weed or tares. Similarly, the second part of the antecedent is denied. For the church is by antonomasia called the bride of Christ, which is the totality of the predestinate, as has already been said. For, if that totality is in the highest sense the bride of Christ, then the church herself is holy, for she is the one dove and the queen standing at the King's right hand, to whom the young virgins are led. Wherefore, as in the days when Christ walked on the earth and companied with the clergy, the high priests, priests and Pharisees—the different grades of the priesthood—observing the traditions of their own making, and asserting that they had God for their Father and that they were of Abraham's seed, and at no time served any man and enjoying a reputation among the people, did not do all these things, so that the clergy might by antonomasia and truly be called the holy church, inasmuch as Christ himself said of them, Matt. 15:14, that the disciples should allow them to take offense, because "they were blind leaders of the blind," so also it is certain that a particular multitude of the clergy is not the holy church simply because it chooses to affirm itself to be the holy church. Such conclusions, it is plain, do not follow. In the first, the inference was drawn [that the clergy is the church] because otherwise it would follow that Christians would not be able to recognize their mother. For we must know our mother by faith, just as we know the church triumphant, Christ and also his mother by faith, and likewise Christ's apostles and all the blessed angels and the
