IX.
THE CHURCH.
WALTER LOCK.
Christianity claims to be at once a life, a truth, and a worship; and, on all these accounts, it needs must find expression in a church. For, in the first place, the life of an individual remains dwarfed and stunted as long as it is lived in isolation; it is in its origin the outcome of other lives; it is at every moment of its existence dependent upon others; it reaches perfection only when it arrives at a conscious sense of its own deficiencies and limitations, and, therefore, of its dependence, and through such a sense realizes with thankfulness its true relation to the rest of life around it. Again, the knowledge of truth comes to the individual first through the mediation of others, of his parents and teachers; as he grows, and his own intellect works more freely, yet its results only gain consistency, security, width, when tested by the results of other workers; and directly we wish to propagate these results, they must be embodied in the lives of others, in societies, in organizations. Without these, ideas remain in the air, abstract, intangible, appealing perhaps to the philosophic few, but high above the reach of the many, the simple. 'All human society is the receptacle, nursery, and dwelling-place of ideas, shaped and limited according to the nature of the society—ideas which live and act on it and in it; which are preserved, passed on, and transmitted from one portion of it to another, from one generation to another; which would be merely abstractions or individual opinions if they were not endowed with the common life which their reception in a society gives them[333].'
These two principles are, obviously, not confined to religious questions. They apply to morality, to society, to politics. They are assumed in all ethical and political treatises. The need of co-operation for common life underlies the whole structure of the Republic of Plato; it is implied in Aristotle's definition of man as a social animal, and in his close association of Ethics with Politics: it has created the family, the tribe, the state; each fresh assertion of the principle, each breaking down of the barriers which separate family from family, tribe from tribe, nation from nation, has been a step forward in civilization. The strength of co-operation for the propagation of ideas is seen in the persistence with which certain nations retain hold on political theories or peculiar features of character; it is seen in the recurring formation of philosophic schools or religious sects or guilds, as soon as any new truth, intellectual or religious, has been discovered, or any moral quality, such as temperance or purity, has needed to be emphasized. The most individualistic of Christian sects have found themselves forced to be ecclesiastical, to define their creeds and to perfect their organization, as soon as they have begun to be missionary.
These principles are as wide as society; but religion takes them up and applies them on the highest level. Religion is, almost universally, the link which binds man to man, no less than that which binds man to a Power above him. So in the Christian Church—if we may anticipate, for a moment, our special application of the principle—the new-born child is taken at once and incorporated into a body of believers; from the first it draws its life from God through the body; it is taught that throughout life it must keep in touch with the body; it must be in a right relation to the other members; it must draw life from them; it must contribute life to them. And, further, this body has existed always and exists still as the home of certain ideas, ideas about God and about human life, which were revealed in Jesus Christ, and which it has to attest in its teaching and embody in its life. It is to be a body of visible persons, themselves the light of the world, expressing so that others can see the manifold wisdom of God, winning others to belief in the unity of God, by the sight of their own one-ness. The first principle might be expressed in the words of Festus to Paracelsus, when the latter had claimed to be God's special instrument in the world;
Were I elect like you,
I would encircle me with love, and raise
A rampart of my fellows: it should seem
Impossible for me to fail, so watched
By gentle friends who made their cause my own