But the world in 1915 is not in the least like that. The old man of our selfish nature, selfish himself and therefore supposing that others must be selfish too, so that he relies upon the methods of cajolery and coercion, has indeed received the kiss of Christ; and while that kiss burns in his heart, so that sometimes he is roused to an aspiration after an order of things altogether different, his opinions and his conduct remain fundamentally unchanged. And the contrast between what is and what might have been is due in part, at least, to the failure of the Church to be true to its own commission. It is also because of this that no practical man dreams of turning to the Church to find the way out from the intolerable situation into which the nations have drifted.
An eminent politician is reported to have defined the Church on a recent occasion in the following terms: "The Church is, I suppose, a voluntary organisation for the maintenance of public worship in the interest of those who desire to join in it." And it is to be feared that many people regard it in some such way as that. But of course the Church is nothing of the kind; the Church is the Body of Christ.
It is not a "voluntary organisation" any more than my body is a voluntary organisation either of limbs or of cells. No one could "voluntarily" join the Church, if by that were meant that the act originated in his own will. "No man can say Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit."[#] A man cannot make himself a Christian. The Apostles were made Christian by Christ Himself—"Ye did not choose Me, but I chose you"[#]; others were made Christian by the Apostles, or (as they always said) by Christ working in and through them; and so successive generations have been made Christian by the Spirit of Christ operative in the fellowship of His disciples—that is to say, in the Church. This is the aspect of truth expressed and preserved in the practice of infant baptism. We are Christians, if at all, not through any act initiated by our own will, but through our being received into the Christian fellowship and subjected to its influence. Just as we are born members of our family, so by our reception into the fellowship of the disciples we are "made members of Christ." In the one case as in the other, we may repudiate our membership or we may disgrace it; we can never abolish it. Let me hasten in parenthesis to add, that this is only one aspect of the truth, and the protest of those who object to infant baptism will be a valuable force in the Church, until we are finally secure against the temptation to regard a sacrament as a piece of magic. For of course it is true that, while no man can make himself a Christian by his own will, no man can be made a Christian against or without his will. It is precisely his will that the Spirit must lay hold of and convert, and the will can refuse conversion.
[#] 1 Cor. xii, 3
[#] S. John xv, 16.
The Church, then, is not a "voluntary organisation," but the creation of God in Christ. In fact it is the one immediate result of our Lord's earthly ministry. When His physical presence was withdrawn, there remained in the world, as fruit of His sojourn here, no volume of writings, no elaborated organisation with codified aims and methods, but a group of people who were united to one another because His Spirit lived and worked in each. And the great marvel lay in this: whereas all men realise that fellowship is better than rivalry, and yet fail to pass from one to the other because they are radically selfish both individually and corporately, in Christ men found themselves to be a real community in spite of their as yet unpurged selfishness. By the invasion of the Divine Life in Christ, the ideal itself, the life of fellowship, is given, and is made into the means of destroying just those qualities which had hitherto prevented its own realisation. The ecclesiastical organisations of to-day are not fellowships of this sort, but if the members of the Church lose their hold on this central principle of fellowship, as they have largely done, we are thrown back upon the futile effort to build up fellowship on the foundation of unredeemed selfishness.
As it is not true to say that the Church is a "voluntary" organisation, so also it is not true to say that it exists "for the maintenance of public worship," at least in the sense that most Englishmen would give to the words. Certainly the Church, consisting of men and women whom God of His sheer goodness has delivered from the power of darkness and translated into the kingdom of His dear Son, will find its first duty, as also its first impulse, in an abandonment of adoration. But if the God who is worshipped is not only some Jewish Jehovah or Mohammedan Allah, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, this love and adoration of God will immediately express itself in the love and service of men, and especially in the passionate desire to share with others the supreme treasure of the knowledge of God. The Church, like its Master, will be chiefly concerned to seek and to save that which is lost, calling men everywhere to repent because the Kingdom of God is at hand. Worship is indeed the very breath of its life, but service of the world is the business of its life. It is the Body of Christ, that is to say, the instrument of His will, and His will is to save the world.
The spiritual life of men is not limited to this planet, and the fulfilment of the Church's task can never be here alone. The Church must call men from temporal to eternal hopes. But in this way it will do more than is possible in any other way to purify the temporal life itself. For most temporal goods are such that the more one person has the less there is for others, so that absorption in them leads inevitably to strife and war. But the eternal goods—love, joy, peace, loyalty, beauty, knowledge—are such that the fuller fruition of them by one leads of itself to fuller fruition by others also, and absorption in them leads without fail to brotherhood and fellowship.
It is not of worship, the breath of the church's life, but of service, the business of its life, that I wish to speak. But this can only be misleading if the other has not first been given prominence. The Church serves because it first worships. Only because it has in itself a foretaste of eternal life, the realised Kingdom of God, can it prepare the way of the Lord, so that His Kingdom may come on earth as it is in heaven.
One question which demands attention concerns the nature of the Church which is to perform this function. Is it enough that there should be vast numbers of Christian individuals gathering together in whatever way is proved by experience to be the most effective for edification, pursuing their profession as Christians, and so gradually leavening life? Or is there need for a quite definite society, with a coherent constitution and a known basis of membership? The former has much to recommend it; it avoids the deadening influence of a rigid machinery; it ensures freedom of spiritual and intellectual development; it may seem to correspond with that loosely constituted group of disciples, which was, as we have seen, the actual fruit of the earthly ministry of Christ. Yet it is condemned by all analogies, and is inadequate to the essential nature of religion.