III.
So then the question comes: How can we foster this life? How can the Church [27] ]continue, through a succession of generations and amid manifold changes of circumstance and thought, not merely its name and organization, its tradition of the fathers and its orthodoxy of language, but a living body of Christ, which shall embody Him, as He would make Himself known to each age?
That is the supreme question. Unless the Church does that, it misrepresents its Lord and hinders the coming of His Kingdom.
Everything must be thought of in terms of vital relation if we are to see our way to an answer. We are dealing with life, and it is life, a unity of life, that connects the individual Christian with his Savior and with his fellow-Christians.
I know vital relations are costly things; it is comparatively easy to preach and profess; it is not easy to give ourselves. But vital relations are abundantly fruitful, and that supreme giving of life which we associate with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is, we know, the most fruitful vital relation that has ever been exhibited in history. [28] ]“He, the Son of man, gave his life a ransom for many”—for the whole world.
Dr. Hort has finely said:
“In the times when Christianity owed nothing to custom and tradition, and when all the ways of ordinary society tended to draw men away from it, what drew them to it and held them to it, despite all persecution, was the power of its life.... Life calling to life was the one victorious power which mastered men and women of all conditions and all grades of culture.”[Footnote 2] ]
We cannot commend the Kingdom of God to the world through institutions that are starched and stiff, but only by the living, warm, expansive touch of human hearts reaching out in fellowship to others.
Men substitute tradition for the living experience of the love of God. They talk and think as though walking with God was attained by walking in the footsteps of men who walked with God. There has been a great deal of that in the Quaker Church.
They substitute authority for leadership, [29] ]the authority of the men of the past for the inspiration of men who have vision and first-hand experience of truth to-day. They substitute conventional methods—we have had a great deal of that, too—for the natural arrangements which a living fellowship of disciples would make and modify from time to time and place to place. They substitute a cold organization for a warm fellowship, an outward profession for an inward experience, priestly agency for personal responsibility, dogmatic teaching for education, almsgiving for personal social service, sectarian ends for the great purposes of the Kingdom of God.