We have to consider the particular communion to which we ourselves belong, and ask whether there are any barriers in it that exclude from its membership or from its working force those who possess the Spirit of Christ, and so are divinely called into the Church and divinely endowed for service. We must make our own communion as inclusive as we believe the Church to be, or we are not attempting to organize the Church of Christ, but to create some exclusive club or sect of Christians of a particular variety.
We must study sympathetically the ways of other communions, and be prepared to borrow freely from them whatever approves itself as inspiring to Christian character and work. A Presbyterian will often refuse to avail himself of the great historic prayers, simply because he thinks he would be copying Lutherans or Episcopalians, forgetting that he is heir of the whole inheritance of the Church, and that his own direct ecclesiastical forbears freely used a liturgy, and even composed some of the most beautiful parts of the Book of Common Prayer; and an Episcopalian will not cultivate the gift of expressing himself in prayer in words of his
own because this is the practice of other communions. As every communion employs in its hymnal the compositions of men and women who in life were members of almost every branch of the Church of Christ, so each should as freely use methods of propaganda, or worship, or education, that have been found valuable in any communion. The more freely we borrow from one another, the more highly we shall prize one another, and the more completely we share the same life, the more quickly will our corporate oneness be felt.
We must set our faces against allowing congregations to embrace but one social class, or several easily combined social strata in the community. In our American towns the Protestant communions are separated more by social caste than by religious conviction. People attend the church where they find "their kind." Poor people do not feel themselves at home, even spiritually, among the well-to-do, and the children of comfortable homes are not permitted to go to the same Sunday School with the children of the tenements. Class lines are as apparent, and almost as divisive, in our churches as
anywhere else. The Church of Christ under such circumstances ceases to be a unifying factor in society; its teaching of brotherhood becomes a mockery. In every community there will be found some entirely unchurched social group; and the churches themselves will be impoverished by the absence of the spiritual appreciations to be found most developed in persons of that stratum. Our denominational divisions tend to accentuate our social divisions. Church unity, lessening the number of congregations in a locality, would help to make the churches that remained more socially inclusive. Meanwhile the "one class church," in any but the very rare homogeneous community, ought to realize that, whatever Christian service it may render, it is all the while doing the cause of Christ a great disservice, and is in need of a radical reorganization and an equally radical spiritual renewal into its Lord's wider sympathies.
Personally we must rigidly examine ourselves and test our right to be considered members of the Body of Christ. There are some New Testament evidences of the Spirit that we must still demand of ourselves. One
is loyal obedience to Jesus: "No man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit." A second is filial trust in God: "Because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father." A third is self-devoting love akin to that shown on Calvary: "The fruit of the Spirit is love;" "By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another." And if the Spirit is within us, He is eager to work through us. We may be quenching Him by laziness, by timidity, by preoccupation. We are of the Body of Christ only as we are "members each in his part."
Above all we must constantly remind ourselves of the Church's adequacy in God for its work. When we speak of the Church we are apt to think first of its limitations; when Paul spoke of the Church its divine resources were uppermost in his mind—"the Church which is His Body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all." Perhaps the Church's greatest weakness is unbelief in its own divine sufficiency. We confront the indifference, the worldliness, the wickedness of men; we face an earth hideous with war and
hateful with selfishness. We think of the Church's often absurdly needless divisions, the backwardness of its thought, the coldness of its devotion, the inefficiency of many of its methods, the want of consecration in a host of its members, the imperfections and limitations of the best and most earnest of them; and we do not really expect any marked advance; we hardly anticipate that the Church will hold its own. Would not our Lord chide us, "O ye of little faith! all power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth, go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations"? "There are diversities of workings, but the same God who worketh all in all."
The Church exists to make the world the Kingdom of God. In the holy city of John's vision there is no temple, for its whole life is radiant with the presence of God and of the Lamb. In the final order there will be no Church, for its task is finished when God is all in all. Meanwhile the Church has no excuse for being except as it continually renders itself less and less necessary. It has to lose itself in sacrificial service in order to save itself. It must never ask itself, "Will