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Page 39
The prayer on our lips, "Thy Kingdom come," we believe to be of God's
own inspiring. The social order which we seek is His eternal purpose;
and it has sworn confederates in sun and moon and stars of light, and in
every human heart. We wait patiently and we work confidently, in the
assurance that the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the Lord of heaven
and earth, will not fail nor be discouraged, until He has set His loving
justice in the earth, and His will is done among all the children of
men, as it was once done by His well-beloved Son.
CHAPTER VII
THE CHURCH
No man's spiritual life starts with himself; there is no Melchizedek
soul--without father or mother. As our bodies are born of the bodies of
others, as our minds are formed from the mental heritage of the race,
our faith is the offspring of the faith of others; and we owe a filial
debt to the Christian society from which we derive our life with God.
Nor is any man's spiritual experience self-sustaining. Our mental
vitality diminishes if we do not keep in touch with thinking people; and
brilliant men often lose their lustre for want of intellectual
companionship. "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the
countenance of his friend." A Christian's religious experience requires
fellowship for its enrichment, and no large soul was ever grown or
maintained in isolation. We are enlarged by sharing the wealthier
spiritual life of the whole believing community.
Nor can a religious man contribute his spiritual endowment to the world
without joining with kindred souls in an organized effort. Edward
Rowland Sill, speaking of his spiritual isolation, wrote to a friend:
"For my part I long to 'fall in' with somebody. This picket duty is
monotonous. I hanker after a shoulder on this side and the other." The
intellectual life of the community organizes itself in schools and
colleges, in newspapers and publishing-houses and campaigns of lectures.
A learned man may do something by himself for his children or his
friends; but he can do incomparably more for a larger public if he is
associated with other learned men in a faculty, assisted by the
publications of the press, and receives pupils already prepared by other
teachers to appreciate his particular contribution. An earnest believer
can accomplish something by himself for the immediate circle of lives
about him; but he is immeasurably more influential when he invests his
inspired personality in the Church, where he finds his efforts for the
Kingdom supplemented by the work of countless fellow toilers, where the
missionary enterprise bears the impetus of his consecration to
thousands he can never see face to face, and where a lasting institution
carries on his life-work and conserves its results long after he has
passed from earth.
The Christian is dependent upon the Church for his birth, his growth,
his usefulness; and this Christian community, or Church, like the
intellectual community, instinctively organizes itself to spread its
life. There is an unorganized Church, in the sense of the spiritual
community, which shares the life of Christ with God and man, as there is
an unorganized intellectual community of more or less educated persons
who possess the mental acquisitions of the race. But this intellectual
community would lose its vitality without its educational agencies; and
the spiritual community would all but die were it not for its
institutions. The spiritual community is the Church; it is organized in
the churches.
As Christians we look back to discover Jesus' conception of the Church.
We find it implicit in His life rather than explicit in His teaching. He
was born into the Jewish Church which in His day was organized with its
Temple and priesthood at Jerusalem, with its Sanhedrin settling its law
and doctrine, with its synagogues with their worship and instruction in
every town and a ministry of trained scribes, and with a wider
missionary undertaking that was spreading the Jewish faith through the
Roman world. It was a community with its sectarian divisions of
Sadducees, Pharisees and the like, but unified by a common devotion to
the one God of Israel and His law. Jesus' personal faith was born of
this Church, grew and kept vigorous by continuous contact with it, and
sought to work through its organization, for He taught in the synagogues
and the Temple.
Jesus does not seem to have been primarily interested either in the
constitution, or the worship, or the doctrine of the Jewish Church. He
criticised the spirit of its leaders, but did not discuss their official
positions. He must have felt that much of the Temple ritual was
obsolete, and that many parts of the synagogue services were crude and
dull, but He entered into their worship that He might share with fellow
believers His expression of trust in His and their God. He did not
invent a new theology, but used the old terms to voice His fuller life
with God. He was primarily interested in the religious experience that
lay back of government, worship and creed; and gave Himself to develop
it, apparently trusting a vigorous life with God to find forms of its
own. So He never broke formally with the Jewish Church; and even after
it had crucified their Master, His disciples are found worshipping in
its Temple, keeping its festivals, and observing its law.
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