Although the doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul is perhaps more widely appreciated than formerly, it may be doubted Whether the same can be said of that of the Holy Spirit lying and operating in the Church as a whole. Sometimes we are so preoccupied with human failings in the Church's members that we tend to forget the intimate presence in the Church of the Divine Guest whose gifts show her to be an opus plane divinum, as Pope Leo XIII called her. We tend to forget that the Church is a theophany, that the ‘Trinity in which Unity is apparent in the unity of the Church—the Father, as the principle to which we are united, the Son as the milieu in which we are united, the Holy Spirit as the tie by which we are united: and all is one'. (Bossuet: Lettre sur l'Unité de l'Eglise.)

Although the early Church was by no means exclusively composed of holy and perfect members, there was in those days, one may think, a more widespread realisation of God's presence in the Church, specially attributed to the Third Person of the Holy Trinity.