# Our New Departure (Brooks)/Chapter 14

Theoretically, Universalists, with rare exceptions, have always believed in the Church—that is, they have assented to it, have made no opposition against it;—practically, they have quite generally neglected, or altogether ignored it. From the very first, indeed, there have been those, both in our pulpits and in our pews, who have strenuously urged its claims, our need of it, and our obligations with respect to it. But the most of our ministers, occupied in other directions, have had no enthusiasm in pressing its importance; and the great mass of those constituting our congregations, while saying in effect, If there are those who wish to have a Church, let them by all means be gratified, have regarded the whole subject with indifference, apparently inaccessible to any appeal concerning it. As the consequence, our parishes, or 'societies,' have usually been organized with little or no thought of a Church, and, once so organized, have been content to go on, year after year, without one; and when churches have been gathered, as was substantially remarked in our Survey of the Field, the membership, as the rule, has been altogether disproportionate to the congregation, with a lamentable absence of men even from this meagre number. It is easy to explain all this; and the review of our history, in some of the preceding chapters, sufficiently suggests the explanation. Just here, however, we are more concerned with the fact than with the explanation. A great improvement has of late years been in progress; but even now, while our last returns give us nine hundred and sixty-nine parishes, they give us but five hundred and sixty-five churches; and with forty-three thousand seven hundred and seventy-one families reported—an aggregate in round numbers, reckoning five persons to a family, of two hundred nineteen thousand—we have reported ​a church-membership only of twenty-seven thousand three hundred and seventy-nine,—about one eighth. These figures, probably, do not fully represent either our aggregate numbers, or our actual church-membership; but they furnish tolerable data on which to estimate the ratio of the latter as compared with the former. This ratio, it is true, might be smaller; but is it at all what is demanded by the highest welfare of the interests we have in charge, and does it not reveal a failure on the part of a large portion of our people to appreciate the real nature of our work as a Christian denomination, and the kind of means by which alone it is to be done?
It is unnecessary to repeat what, in so many forms, has been set forth in the pages foregoing. But we cannot be too constantly reminded that spiritual life is the one final condition of religious power; and, unless all that has hereinbefore been said is unfounded, incalculable detriment has come to our cause from the state of thought and feeling among us which this wide-spread neglect of the Church evinces,—has come to us, first, because we have so lacked the religious life and purpose which the Church expresses; and, second, because we have so failed to make use of the Church as one of the appointed means of religious influence. Is not this a sufficient warning as to our need of a New Departure in this regard, and a corresponding call that we earnestly give ourselves to the effort to promote and deepen the tendency towards a better state of things? To organize churches, or to swell by any means the number of those formally connected with them, is not, let it be confessed, the highest duty of a Christian people. Church-membership, unfortunately, is not always a sign of elevated character, or of a consecrated life; nor has any Church, probably, ever yet gathered into itself all the truly Christian souls of the congregation with which it has been connected. There are as good people outside formal Church associations as there are inside; and there are not a few who talk much about Religion and the Church and the Lord's Supper, who would honor Christ and the Christian cause far more, though they never joined a Church, if they talked less of these things, and lived nearer to the Saviour, more loyal to his cause. ​But, notwithstanding these things, the fact none the less remains, that the Church is the appointed method for the organization of Christian faith and purpose, and an important aid in Christian culture; and those who believe in Christ, loving and meaning to serve him, are in their true relations to God or to him, to the conditions of their own best life, or to the world, only as they are in sacred covenant with God in church-membership.
There are three senses in which the word Church seems to be used in the New Testament:—1. As synonymous with our race, according to the teaching of the Gospel that Humanity is one,—the body of which Christ is the head: as when the Apostle says to the Ephesians (v. 25, 27) that "Christ loved the Church, and gave himself for it, . . . that he might present it to himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish;" and to the Colossians (i. 17, 18), "He is before all things, and by him all things consist, and he is the head of the body, the Church." 2. As meaning the whole organized family of Christian faith: as when our Lord says, referring to Peter's confession of his Messiahship, "On this rock I will build my Church;" and as when the Apostle says to the Corinthians (1 Cor. xii. 28), "God hath set some in the Church, first, apostles," etc., and to the Ephesians (iii. 21), "Unto Him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages." 3. As indicating any body of believers, formally pledged to Christ, and organized for his service, with conditions of membership, means of improvement, and rules of discipline: as when our Lord said, speaking of the course to be pursued in the case of an offending member, "Tell it unto the Church" (Matt. xviii. 17); and as the word is most commonly employed. And besides these, though I am not aware of any instance in which the New Testament literally so employs it,—unless Heb. xii. 23, be such an instance,—there is still another sense in which we are taught by the spirit of the New Testament to use the word,—viz., as meaning the whole multitude of awakened and reconciled souls,—the vast company of the redeemed on ​earth and in heaven, the Church invisible: a sense nowhere, perhaps, better illustrated than in Charles Wesley's fine hymn,—
But while these different senses of the word are all to be borne in mind, and we are, on occasion, to make due account of them, the one meaning technically and most commonly intended by the Church is, the organized religious life of Christendom,—Christianity institutionally embodied. In the broadest sense, it is never to be forgotten, the Church is not specially a Christian institution. It is "the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth"—the symbol of faith in God, and of righteous purpose towards Him. As such, it has existed from the hour that a human heart was first awakened towards God, and found other hearts to associate with it. Spiritually, this Church has included all of every age and nation, whatever the name or form of their worship, who, with any conception of the one true God, have aspired towards Him, and given themselves to His service. But organically, inasmuch as such are to be found mainly in the line of those to whom God's special revelations have come, it is in this line that the descent and history of the Church are to be traced. As far back as Noah, he and his family constituted the Church. To them succeeded the patriarchs, and to them, at length, the Jewish nation, as the people in covenant with God to recognize and obey Him, followed, in the fulness of time, by the Christian Church. The Church may thus be said to be coeval in its existence with that of our race, completing, ​with the family and the state, the trinity of primary forms or institutions in which it has pleased God to organize mankind. The family organizes our domestic life; the state, our civil relations; the Church, our religious nature, worship and work; and if the family, or the state, can in any sense be spoken of as a Divine institution, with the authority of God for its sanction, in the same sense, the Church may be so pronounced. Nor can a claim be set up, or an argument be made, as to the legitimacy, necessity, or authority, of the family or the state—both which are on all hands conceded to have their foundation in nature itself—that cannot be paralleled and equally maintained in behalf of the Church. The Romish Church is organized on this postulate. Hence—for one reason—its power. It is one of the weaknesses of Protestantism that it has to so large an extent overlooked this fact—for, so far as it is overlooked, loss in respect to all those ends which the Church is intended to serve must ensue. The thing for us to understand, if we would attain to any measure of religious power, is the thing which has thus been so widely overlooked; and if we are to realize any such future as a Christian people as we easily may, we must renounce our looseness and indifference concerning the Church, and, awaking to perceive what it is as an ordinance of God and as one of the means of Christian efficiency, must put ourselves into solemn covenant with God and the Saviour in it, enforcing its authority, availing ourselves of its influence, and systematically employing every instrumentality which it supplies.
That the Church in this sense has the warrant of Christ's sanction and appointment—to go now no farther back—no intelligent person, reading the New Testament, can doubt. The "little flock" which he gathered on such stringent conditions shows us its origin; and the churches everywhere formed by the Apostles, as they went forth making converts to Christ, show us how it was continued and extended. Some have argued that it is not necessary to form churches, on the ground that the Church, in the New Testament sense, is the whole congregation. But it is certain that the Apostolic churches were something more than mere congregations. They were distinct, formally or​ganized bodies, composed only of those openly committed to Christ, and responsible for discipline—usually embracing all acknowledged Christians, it is true, but only because all such regarded it as a duty thus to identify themselves with Christ, and were not recognized as really Christians until they had done so. To these can be lineally traced the churches of the present day.
It was impossible that Christianity should be preached as a living word without some such association of those believing it. Every live thing in this world, sooner or later, gets organized. A germ cannot be vital without assuming some form. A living embryo necessitates a body in which the living principle shall clothe itself. And the law of animal and vegetable existence, this is none the less true in the realm of ideas. Wherever men are in earnest, having living and positive convictions, whether in business, science, politics, or religion, organization in due time follows—loose and informal, or compact and thorough, according to their definiteness of aim and earnestness of purpose. The Church of God through all history,—the Christian Church as Christ organized it, and as it has since existed, is simply the result of this general law—as the family and the state are each the result of a similar necessity in their respective domains.
The parish, or religious society, comes about under this law as a partial organization of Christianity. It is the organization of Christianity as a theory, or as a public social interest,—the natural flowing together of those agreed as to the importance or desirableness of religious institutions, though they may not yet be ready to enter into formal personal covenant with Christ as their Redeemer; and the fact that no such 'society' exists where there is material for it, is demonstrative evidence that there are no positive favorable convictions among the people touching the subject. The Church is the same thing in a higher form. It is the organization of Christianity as a moral conviction. As such a conviction, taking hold of the conscience and the heart, Christianity is a very living and positive thing. As the consequence, wherever two or more persons, thus penetrated and vivified,
There are those who do not like the name. But this is of little moment. The thing is the chief concern; and wherever the conditions meet, this will appear, demanding some designation. Christ called it the Church, and it may be doubted whether his nomenclature can be improved. But whether we call it by this name, or by some other, or by none, the fact will be the same. Bars may be put up, and bolts interposed, to prevent. Those concerned may be forbidden under heavy penalties to come together. A place to meet may be denied them; and they may be hedged about by every hinderance and restriction which bigotry or malice can invent. It will all avail nothing. They will come together. Bars will be overleaped. Penalties will be defied. Caves and by-places will become their temples for ​worship. The street and the market will serve them as places of communion. And despite all efforts to the contrary, there will be hours when their hearts will mingle and burn in sacred sympathy, and when they will find help, encouragement and joy in the sweetness of mutual counsel, or in the uplifting power of mutual prayer.
It is, every way, most unfortunate that this natural and necessary origin of the Church is so almost universally overlooked, and that a conception so foreign to the fact prevails instead. The idea of most persons is that the Church is altogether formal and arbitrary;—a kind of religious pound which somebody has invented, into which men and women, found at large in this world, are driven for safe keeping, until Death calls for and transfers them to Heaven. But all such ideas—in which even some church-members more or less participate—do great injustice to the Church, and utterly fail of any thought of its real nature and purpose. It is no walled enclosure, from which any are shut out. It is rather an open field, into which all gather whose hearts are in sympathy with Christ and with each other, and into which all are at liberty to gather who are attracted thither; a spiritual household, open to all who are moved towards it, and who have the preparation which will make them at home in it. No doubt there are those who feel under an arbitrary restraint in the Church; who find life in it irksome; to whom it is a kind of pound, shutting them in from pursuits and associations which, at heart, they prefer, and all whose tastes and desires beat against the imaginary walls within which they are confined, as an imprisoned bird beats against the sides of its cage. But such persons have no real church-membership. Their church-connection is simply external and seeming, into which they have been brought by a fear of hell, or by some motive equally foreign to that which can alone put one actually into the Church. The genuine bond of church-union is not outward, but inward. It is a bond of spiritual sympathy,—the confession of spiritual attractions: just as it is no artificial contrivance but a subtle and unseen force, which unites a drop of water to its kindred drops, or assimilates into one body the separate particles of any human frame; and only those thus ​drawn into the Church as the home of their hearts, and whose outward church-membership is the sign of Christ's work in their souls, and of their inward consecration to him and their unity with all who love him, are really in the Church, or can be cited to illustrate what the Church is, or what it is fitted to do. What but this is the inmost meaning of the fact that no sooner does one become religiously awakened, than he begins to seek religious associations and to feel drawn towards the Church as his spiritual home,—while no sooner does his heart grow cold and his religious interest decline, than his sympathy with the Church declines, and he more or less withdraws from it?
Christianity itself is founded in human nature; and only, we may be sure, because the Church is thus in accordance with nature, having its origin and foundation in this ineradicable law of spiritual affinity and attraction, did our Lord recognize it as the fitting organization of his religion, and make membership in it at once the privilege and the duty of all who love him. And if, amidst the hazards and sacrifices which discipleship cost in his time, and the times immediately following, so many were made heroic in superiority to all considerations of personal safety, under the impulse of a faith and love that clasped him as Lord, and thus found themselves flowing together in the sympathy of a common purpose to own and serve him, how should it be in these later times, when no hazards bristle and no such sacrifices are required? Unfortunately, however, while it is true that all in whom the work of Christian faith and spiritual awakening has proceeded up to a certain point, are instinctively, by this law of spiritual affinity and attraction, impelled to find corresponding associations within the Church, the far greater number professing faith in Christ fail to reach this point of awakening, and so, failing to feel this propulsion towards the Church, fail to find their way into it as they ought. This is the sad fact concerning the great majority of Protestant Christendom, and is the fact with which Protestantism is called to deal as it never yet has been dealt with.
Romanism has solved one side of the problem of the Church. It has shown what a power for good—and for ​evil—the Church may be, as an absolute authority dominating reason and subordinating our whole nature to a passive faith. Gathering "into its perfumed and symbolic shrines those believing natures, those leaning and devout souls to whom a too naked Protestantism denies any food for the religious imagination,"—obtaining the possession and mastery of its votaries so as to command their loyalty, money and attendance on public worship, as no other form of Christian faith ever has done, and producing, under favorable conditions, some of the sweetest and saintliest lives that have ever blossomed amidst the selfishness, or shed their fragrance into the moral miasms, of the world, it has nevertheless proved a failure as an element of popular life and general civilization, because, in the very nature of the authority it asserts, inimical to free thought, to popular education, to a rugged self-reliance, to enterprise, to civil liberty, and so unfavorable alike to material, intellectual, moral and social progress. The beggary, ignorance and general shiftlessness of all Catholic communities, in the ratio of their vassalage to Church-rule—to say nothing of the lawlessness and barbarism of large numbers whom it fails to hold, or of the pauperism and crime with which it is so shockingly flooding our American society—give the sad but unanswerable verdict of history against Catholicism, alike as an interpretation of the offices of the Church and as a ministry to the spiritual needs of the world.
Can Protestantism more successfully solve both sides of the problem? Can it show what the Church is divinely appointed to be as a guiding and helpful influence, appealing equally to reason and to faith, and harmonizing them in a Church-life, the blended product of the two? Morally and religiously, this is the Providential question of the hour. Thus far, it has to be confessed, Protestantism has but complemented the failure of Catholicism, by solving the problem on the other side. While it has deserved to have many things said in its praise, and has shown itself especially favorable to liberty, to self-respect, to a busy and thriving material enterprise and to intellectual progress, it has at the same time shown how little mere brain or argument can do to serve the highest spiritual ends. It has demonstrated ​that appeals solely to reason, or to logic, are, in their way, as unproductive of good, and as likely to issue in evil, as appeals only to faith. It has fostered self-assertion; has induced denial, and cultivated doubt. Unlike Catholicism, educating the people to feel themselves strangers and foreigners to the Church, it has led them to feel that the Church is nothing to them, or they to it, till some supernatural crisis in their experience puts them into new relations to God, and makes it proper that they should claim to be among His saints. It has thus destroyed the hold of the Church on the people's hearts; has induced the feeling that it is for those perfected, and not for those needing help; and so has not only divested it in the popular apprehension of anything like authority, but has weakened its appeals, destroyed its attractions, and made it something quite else than the spiritual home and beneficent aid which it was designed to be. In a word, stripping away the tinsel and the drapery with which Catholicism has upholstered religion and the Church, Protestantism has left the first a dogma rather than a sentiment, and made the latter only a form instead of a living and pregnant fact. As the result, the Church as it stands to-day in the thought of the great mass of Protestantdom is a mere voluntary human association, with no special sanction or authority, into which it is simply well enough for those to go who feel so inclined, and not a Divine institution, sacred and venerable, with essential uses as the channel of spiritual influence, and rightfully demanding the homage, membership and service of every soul believing in God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Is Protestantism equal to the task of correcting all this—its own work, and of so interpreting the Church and its claims and purposes as to insure for it its legitimate hold upon the reason and faith of the people? If not, Protestantism is to prove as signal a failure as Romanism, because proving incompetent to enthrone religion in the life of the people, and thus to organize them for the service of Christ in his Church.
It is not, in my judgment, an open question whether what is called 'evangelical' Protestantism is thus to fail. Except as it modifies its fundamental ideas, and commits itself to new expositions,—both of the truth of Christ and of the ​relations and uses of the Church,—it must fail. The Past sufficiently attests this; and one of the purposes of the Universalist Church, in the Providence of God, I believe, is so to interpret what the Church is, and so to press what it demands as, in this failure of 'evangelical' Protestantism, to supply what the time in this respect requires. Universalism harmonizes reason and faith, and is thus able to present an ideal of the Church equally satisfying to both. It, and it alone, gives us the Church republicanized; and only the right awakening of Universalists to the meaning of the truth they profess, and therefore to the meaning and offices of the Church, is required to insure a result so much to be desired. Hitherto, as was sufficiently intimated in the opening of this chapter, Universalists have not given the Church the place in their regards to which it is entitled. On the contrary, some of the worst influences of Protestantism in this respect have come to fruit among us; and owing to the indifference, to the unjustifiable self-distrust, or to the prejudices and misconceptions thus begotten, we have been conspicuously behind most others in the signs of Church-interest and Church-life.
On the one hand, we have had those—no very large number—who have decried or neglected the Church altogether, and, on the other, those who have so advocated it as to make it of little or no account. The former, on various grounds, have said, We will have no Church; the latter have said, Let us have the Church, but, to conciliate opposition, or secure members, have lowered the standard of its requirements, and cheapened the significance of its vows. I have known large additions to some of our Churches thus procured—only to increase the Church in form, while lessening it in moral power, placing those entering it in a false position because ostensibly committing them to that in which they saw no meaning, and for which they had neither sympathy nor care. The result has been disastrous in many ways. Henceforward all this must cease, or ere another century, though our truth will remain, we shall denominationally have run our course. The world needs, and must have, the Church as the perpetual symbol of religious ideas, and as the means of communicating spiritual life. There ​can be no permanence of religious influence or results without it; and the people who are religiously to possess the Future are the people who, having the most of truth and religious life, shall best comprehend how to make the Church legitimately a power, and use it accordingly. This possession of the Future will be ours, if we do not blindly and perversely throw it away; but it can be ours only on this condition, viz., that we organize ourselves in the Church spirit, and seek to become a Church after Christ's ideal.
Not that we are to dispense with our parish organizations. They are desirable and important in their place. Some among us are urging that they should be discontinued, and that the Church should be the sole primary body. But our General Convention, at Gloucester, committed itself very decidedly against this view. As a part of the Report on the revision of our fundamental law there submitted, a draft for the Constitution and By-laws of a Church organized on this plan was presented; but the Convention almost unanimously refused to sanction it, or even to allow it to be published. It thus unmistakably declared in favor of the parish and the Church, as together constituting the best method for our primary organization; and though as one of the committee who reported the draft referred to, I was personally disposed, in deference to those who think such an organization best, to submit the draft for their use, my very strong conviction was that the system which the Convention thus approved is on every account wisest in principle as well as most expedient in practice. The spirit of our American institutions demands that every one sympathizing with our ideas, who contributes to the support of a congregation, shall be entitled to a voice in the management of its affairs; and it is easy to see that the larger the number who can be actually enlisted in our work the better. Nor is there any reason why a good man, fully committed to our 'Confession,' and liberally paying his money to maintain a parish, should either be debarred the privilege of an active participation in its business because he does not yet feel prepared to enter the Church, or be compelled, for the sake of having this privilege, to connect himself with the Church before he is ready. The temporalities of a congregation are equally the ​concern of all connected with it, and, on a proper basis, the accruing rights should be denied to no one.
But while the parish should be continued, it should on all hands be understood that it can in no way fill the place, or answer the uses, of the Church. True, as a Christian body, it ought always to mean Christian faith and moral uprightness, and by whatever name it may be called, it is not a Christian parish if care is not taken that it shall mean both these; but these, in the nature of the case, are all that it can mean. The Church alone stands not simply for faith, but for religious experience and purpose; for the love of Christ and consecration to him; for an awakened sense of God, and a formal assumption of religious vows. Nor, it deserves to be said, is it among the least of the reasons why the parish and the Church should be distinct bodies, that only thus can this purely religious significance of the Church be best maintained. Where there is no parish, and any voice in the administration of the financial and business affairs of the congregation can be had alone by Church-members, a motive is furnished to induce Church-membership that is wholly foreign to its real purpose. On this account most Churches organized on this basis have those in their membership whose hearts have never had the slightest religious awakening, and whose membership means only that they desire, or that others desire for them, the right to participate in the offices and business of the organizations; and I have heard of instances in which Churches so constituted have been recruited by considerable numbers solely to carry some measure for which they were willing to vote. What meaning or worth has church-membership so induced? Were there nothing else, the argument thus suggested would seem to me enough to determine judgment against the Church as the sole body, and in favor of the dual method so decidedly recommended by our Convention. In this particular I have made a study of the subject through a pastorate of several years where the Church is the sole organization, and, as the result, all my former convictions have been strengthened, and I am more than ever satisfied of the wisdom of the Convention in approving the method it did. The Church has a peculiar character, and is not what Christ ​means by the Church except as this is maintained. As the Church, it is God's specific means for organizing souls in consecration to Him. It may have adjuncts and auxiliaries—the more of the right sort the better. But it alone embodies Christianity for its best work either in those who believe it, or for its warfare against sin, and is the conduit through which flows the largest measure of enlightening and redemptive power for the quickening and salvation of the world. And this being so, nothing, on the one hand, should be permitted to impair or qualify this distinctive purpose of the Church, and, on the other, every individual stirred to any becoming sense of God, or to any love for Christ, should instinctively gravitate towards it, as the heart of a child towards the home of its love.
It is in the due recognition and emphasis of these two facts that we are to see our special work in respect to the Church; and only as we give them this recognition and emphasis, and thus distinctly and systematically cultivate the Church spirit, and work to Church ends, can we either so interpret the Church itself, or so press its demands, as to make our Church the required answer to the needs of the time. The important inquiry demanding our attention is, How shall we best do this? and on what grounds shall our claim for the Church be built, and the obligations towards it be enforced?
The ultimate end to be aimed at, it is clear after what has been said, is, to put the Church into its legitimate place with the family and the State, in the thought and affections of the people. Catholicism has done this, after its fashion; and herein, for one reason, as was just now said, has lain its power. It has suffered nobody reached by its teachings to think of the Church as artificial or adventitious, or as something in which they could possibly have no concern. The Church is organic, primal, its position has been—no less than the family or the State. On this foundation Romanism has always built. Hence, it insists, every child born of Catholic parents is born into the Catholic Church, just as it is born into the family of which it is a member, or into the State of which it is a subject or citizen; every convert to its creed is, of course, by virtue of his or her conversion, ​another recruit for the Church; and every child born out of it on whom it can lay its hands in baptism is by this act inducted into its guardianship, and becomes its possession. Catholicism knows nothing of outsiders among those bearing its name, or to whom it can by any means lay claim. As the result, every boy or girl of Catholic parentage, every child acquired, every proselyte, every person of whatever age, within the line of its instruction, is trained to feel, I am of the Church: the Church belongs to me, and I belong to it; all its associations and traditions, all its saints and holy martyrs, all that makes it honorable because of what it has done, and venerable as the daughter of God and the bride of the Lamb, are but parts of my possessions, as all its gorgeous ritual, and all its precious privileges, and all the truth of which it is the keeper, and all its historic days and festivals are for my help and salvation; and because of what it thus is to me, and of what I am to it, I am to love, to honor, to serve it as I do my parents, my country, my God—am to glory in it as my chief pride, counting it my highest duty to live faithful to it, and willing, if need be, to die for it.
And thus instructing and impressing all whom it can bring within its influence, what wonder that Catholicism so grasps and holds its millions by ties stronger than hooks of steel, or that it wields so tremendous a power because the object of an attachment so intense, and of a loyalty so supreme? In all this, it is easy to see, there are elements of superstition, and of spiritual domination and slavery, which, building on reason as well as on faith, we totally abjure; nor is it ever to be forgotten, in speaking of Catholicism and its influence, how low and arbitrary are the motives on which it largely relies, nor what flocks of its adherents, so devoted to their Church and its worship, have only the hollowest form of religious service, while religion itself seems to have no place, as a principle, in their thought or life. But after all the abatements thus required,—and they are many,—here, in substance, if there be any reality in the Church, is the true theory concerning it and our relations and obligations to it; and it is for us, if we would have our Church a Church in fact as well as in name, carefully to study the Romish Church, and its methods, and the ​secret of its power, and, so far as we can in accordance with the better genius and nobler aims of our faith, to act upon them. Only on this condition is anything possible to us as a Church.
There are those who are greatly enamoured with the externals of Catholicism—its sacerdotal pomps and processions, its imposing ceremonies, its music, and all the sensational appeals through which it addresses eye and ear and the religious imagination. In these, they suppose, chiefly resides its power, and in an imitation of these, they would have us believe, is our only hope of making any Church really churchly and effective. But such, I am satisfied, mistake, looking too much on the surface. These things, no doubt, have their influence—perhaps more than some of us suppose. But the ritual, drapery and elaborate sacerdotalism of Rome are mainly of the past. Only its better spirit is of all time. In this, therefore, we are to find the chief explanation of its power; and it is this that we most need to study and to copy. I have no doubt, indeed, that we might with great profit relieve the barrenness of our Protestant church-edifices by the introduction of appropriate pictures and statuary, and might add much to the religious helpfulness of our services by congregational singing, and by whatever else would suitably tend to make them services for worship, and not mere preaching-meetings. But I am fully persuaded that any man, or any body of men, will in vain essay to transfer the gowns and robes and chasubles, the genuflexions and ecclesiasticisms, the reading-desks and ritual of Catholicism or of High Church Episcopalianism, into the Church that is to come, or attempt to put the fresh, rationalistic life of Protestantism into the effete forms of Romanism. The rising David cannot be clothed in the armor of the doomed Saul. The Church of the Future is to be a vitalized Protestant Church, and not a rejuvenated Roman Catholic Church with the Pope left out. New ideals must clothe themselves in new forms. David must wear his own armor, and do his better work in his better way. But excluding all that is inconsistent either with our ideas of motive, or with our notions of liberty and the right of private judgment, and speaking only of what is unobjec​tionable to us in Catholicism as to the spirit and practical sagacity of its methods, as to Church-ideas and underlying principles, as to winning, formative, holding power, these, as Catholicism has combined and availed itself of them, are essential and permanent, and have rendered the Romish Church one of the most wonderful organizations for effective religious work—perhaps the most wonderful that the world has ever seen. These we can, and should, copy; and so far as we do so, educating our people and others into the accruing conception of the Church, and its work, and its relations to the religious life of the world, and the authority it is entitled to exercise, and the uses it should be made to serve, we shall approximate the true ideal of the Church as to form, and find ourselves fulfilling the offices and wielding the fitting power of a Church as to fact. Then Universalists will feel something more than a mere temporary local or personal attachment to particular parishes or ministers. Wherever they go, they will carry with them a sense of permanent and organic membership in the Universalist Church, binding them to identify themselves with the nearest Universalist fellowship, and not permitting them, as they now so often do, to drift on removal into other connections, or to be lost in no connection. Then we shall have a Church fulfilling all Church offices, "baptizing infancy, not as a family custom, but as a Church sacrament; confirming the children, and taking them into its more immediate bosom as they attain adult years; making both marriage and burial rites of the immediate altar; and giving back to the Holy Communion something of the sanctity which two centuries have been trying to dispel, without gaining anything except the prospect of its extinction." The Episcopal Church and some other Protestant Churches are to some extent realizing this ideal. Our 'Children's Sunday,' baptizing our children as the children of the Church, to be in due time confirmed in their Church privileges, is a step in the right direction. Let other steps as fast as practicable follow; and in due time the world will see the result in the Universalist Church, organized and thoroughly doing its work as a Church indeed.
In the mean time, keeping this constantly in view, and ​sedulously shaping our action and methods with reference to the end to be thus reached, we are to neglect nothing that will duly direct attention to the Church, and keep it before the people as the objective point of all our efforts, so far as forms and outward helps are concerned. Our one purpose and earnest labor must be to familiarize all whom we can reach with the obligations to a religious life; to quicken and educate our children and people into a becoming sense of what the Church is, and what are its claims; and to press on them the fact that only as what has heretofore been called the Universalist denomination is spiritually consolidated into a Church, whatever other organizations we may have, can we be the people God is calling for, or enter into the inheritance offered us.
There are various grounds on which we may do this. Among them may be mentioned,—
1. The fact that respect for the example and authority of Christ and his Apostles demands a regard for the Church and identification with it. That he instituted, and that they continued, the Church, and that alike he and they call all who believe on him into it, the New Testament everywhere shows. How, then, if we confess any obligation to heed their teaching, can we neglect what they so enjoin? Mere conditions or accessories may, indeed, be changed, or disregarded, according to circumstances; but the essential institution itself—how can we fail to accord to this what it calls for, without in effect declaring that we think ourselves wiser than they from whom it comes? "I can be as good out of the Church as in it," some are fond of saying. But why then did Christ institute it? He did not establish it for a few, nor except for some good reason, we may be sure. It is no more necessary for one than for another; has no claims on one that it has not on all; and if one may be justified in its neglect, or in thinking it of no use, then all may be, and the Church may properly cease for lack of members! But this cannot be. The outward Church is the body and symbol of the spiritual family of which Christ is head, and of which all united to him in faith and love are members. He knew what was in man, and this outward Church was instituted, his action certifies us, and the ​Lord's Supper was given—not as indifferent things, mere forms, which Christians are at liberty to employ or not, as they may choose, but only because there were essential uses for them to serve. And if they have such uses in the case of one, they have them not less for all; and if one is under obligation to defer to Christ's judgment as to what was necessary and best, and cannot fail to do so without disrespect to him and those who succeeded to the administration of his kingdom, why is not the same equally true of all?
2. Moreover, how is Christianity to be organized in its positive, spiritual purpose, without the Church? It is "nothing until an institution." Reference has sufficiently been made to the distinction between the parish and the Church. The former, as I hope has appeared, is expedient, and often necessary, for its specific uses; but it is a mere legal body, meaning simply faith in the truth of Christianity and an upright moral life. The Church embodies Christianity in its highest meaning—as a religious experience, a religious purpose, a power for religious consecration. Is Christianity to be denied such representation? Everything else, as we have seen, is organized: shall Christ alone fail to have the advantage of the association of his friends in direct and personal committal to him?
3. Still further: Out of the Church, there is, unfortunately, little keen sense of obligation to live in personal nearness to Christ, in a religious life. Church-membership, it is true, creates no such obligation. The obligation is original and absolute, preceding all churches and all church-vows. Church-membership is merely the confession of it, and the pledging of one's self to try to live as it demands. But without the Church, there is seldom any such confession. A general sense of moral responsibility does, we know, exist outside the Church, but till the Church is entered, all purely religious obligations set lightly on the conscience. No pledges to a religious life are understood to be given, and no expectations of such a life are felt to be warranted. This is a state of things, we may well say, that should not exist. But it does exist. Who that is out of Church-relations, reading these pages, does not feel somewhat less bound to live piously and prayerfully than ​though the vows of church-membership had been solemnly assumed? Uniting with a Church, one is really no more bound to such a life than before; but it is at once felt that responsibility is intensified, if not created. A formal profession has been made; pledges of consecration have been plighted; certain expectations are felt to be justified; and naturally, one has a corresponding sense of obligation to live accordingly.
And should there not be something to bring us into this state of feeling? Who does not need all the healthful restraints and all the legitimate aids and stimulants to right living that can possibly be supplied? Who will say that it is a matter of small consequence that the Gospel has been given us, or that Christ has done so much for us? And if these are not small things, who will say that we do not need all that can in any way fitly serve to keep us sensible of them, deepening our consciousness of obligation, and kindling and impelling us to careful and studied Christian living? Is not the Church, then, a necessity?
4. Nor is this all. Independent of this increased sense of responsibility which it nurtures, the Church is an important help towards the Christian life through the closer and more sympathetic relations into which it brings its members; through the occasions for prayer and religious conversation, counsel and encouragement which it supplies; through the mutual watchfulness which it enjoins; and especially through the communion of the Lord's Supper to which it invites. Without the Church, there would be none of these things, as the Church gives them. And how much would thus be lost in the loss—especially of the Lord's Supper—which, without the Church, would inevitably ensue!
These are some of the considerations in view of which the Church is commended to our attention, and by which it is made the duty of every Christian believer, and especially of every Universalist, to be in its membership, in earnest and working sympathy with its purpose to conquer and absorb the world. But the great consideration, after all, is that which has been the underlying thought of this chapter,—viz., that the Church is the natural and organic relation of souls born into the kingdom of God through the minis​try of His Son; that it is the channel through which God communicates His Holy Spirit and saving power most directly and potently for the enlightenment and redemption of souls; and that only in it can we put ourselves into best contact with spiritual influences, or best express our faith and love and Christian purpose. This is the fact that renders all other considerations comparatively unimportant, and that, giving the Church its high vantage-ground as an ordinance of God, summons all who believe in Him, or in the Saviour He has sent, to say, with one heart and one voice,—
True, the Church may be abused;—what good thing may not be? Its obligations may not always be kept;—what obligations are? It may be joined in self-righteousness and with airs of pretentious piety;—what institution may not have unworthy members? It may be said—it is sometimes said—that the Church is exclusive, and sets up improper distinctions; but whose fault is it if it makes distinctions, or if the many are out, and only the few are in it? The doors are open; all are under equal obligation to comply with the terms of membership, and are invited and urged to enter. Who are to be blamed if all do not enter? Those who identify themselves with the Church, in the true church-spirit, make no pretensions to a superior goodness,—put on no airs,—set themselves in no way above their neighbors. They simply say, We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and desire to consecrate ourselves to him. They go into the Church not because they think themselves good enough, or ​wish to separate themselves from others, but because they wish formally to commit themselves to Christ, and desire the help of the Church to make them better. And who will question their right, or deny them the privilege of doing so, especially when their plea with each one who has not done so is, "Come thou with us, and we will do thee good?"
The subject is large and invites still further unfolding. But I will not extend the chapter. Even from this imperfect presentation of it, is it not clear that there is far more in it than many bearing our name have ever imagined, and that in no particular are we more urgently called to a New Departure than in our estimates, work, and denominational conscience with reference to the Church? Grant all that can be alleged as to the improving tendencies of thought among us in this regard, how long could we go on as we are, with our present ratio of church-membership and our present average of heedlessness and neglect, and have any standing, or exert any power, as a people of God? The question God is asking us is, whether we will be true to our ideas. The Church is one of the means through which we are to give our answer. What shall it be? God help us, that the answer be right.