They should ward off fate's envy:—the great gift,
Extravagant when claimed by me alone,
Being so a gift to them as well as me[334]:
the second principle by lines applied originally to the Incarnation, but which we may legitimately transfer to the Church, which continues the work of the Incarnation,
And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the Creed of Creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
Store strong than all poetic thought[335].
But, further, religion adds a third application of its own to this principle of co-operation: for a church grows also out of the necessities of worship. The ritual needed for the offering of sacrifice almost necessitates of itself a number of persons for its performance. No doubt, an individual can worship God in private, but so his worship tends to be self-centred and narrow: for the full expression of his religious relation to others, for expiating a wrong done by him to his neighbours or to the whole community, for expressing gratitude for mercies which have come to him through others, there must be the common meeting: and the community as a whole has its great victories for which to thank God, its national dangers for which to pray, its national sins for which to offer expiation; and hence, common religious acts have been the universal accompaniment of national life, and have in their turn reacted upon it.
The idea of a Church, then, as conceived in its most general form, and without especial reference to the Christian Church, is this, that it widens life by deepening the sense of brotherhood; that it teaches, strengthens, and propagates ideas by enshrining truth in living witnesses, by checking the results of isolated thinkers by contact with other thinkers, and by securing permanency for the ideas; and that it expands and deepens worship by eliminating all that is selfish and narrow, and giving expression to common aims and feelings.