a high standard of virtue, soften manners, diffuse enlightenment.  Would it not be well for her to adapt her ends to her means?

No, it would not be well; it would be fatal to do so; and Christ meant what he said, and said what was true, when he pronounced the Enthusiasm of Humanity to be everything, and the absence of it to be the absence of everything.  The world understands its own routine well enough; what it does not understand is the mode of changing that routine.  It has no appreciation of the nature or measure of the power of enthusiasm, and on this matter it learns nothing from experience, but after every fresh proof of that power, relapses from its brief astonishment into its old ignorance, and commits precisely the same miscalculation on the next occasion.  The power of enthusiasm is, indeed, far from being unlimited; in some cases it is very small....

But one power enthusiasm has almost without limit—­the power of propagating itself; and it was for this that Christ depended on it.  He contemplated a Church in which the Enthusiasm of Humanity should not be felt by two or three only, but widely.  In whatever heart it might be kindled, he calculated that it would pass rapidly into other hearts, and that as it can make its heat felt outside the Church, so it would preserve the Church itself from lukewarmncss.  For a lukewarm Church he would not condescend to legislate, nor did he regard it as at all inevitable that the Church should become lukewarm.  He laid it as a duty upon the Church to reclaim the lost, because he did not think it utopian to suppose that the Church might be not in its best members only, but through its whole body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that can charm away the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to the savage and the outlaw lurking in moral wildernesses an entrancing view of the holy and tranquil order that broods over the streets and palaces of the city of God....

Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing; and if there sometimes appear in the history of the Church instances of a tone which is pure and high without being enthusiastic, of a mood of Christian feeling which is calmly favourable to virtue without being victorious against vice, it will probably be found that all that is respectable in such a mood is but the slowly-subsiding movement of an earlier enthusiasm, and all that is produced by the lukewarmness of the time itself is hypocrisy and corrupt conventionalism.

Christianity, then, would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned its missionary character and became a mere educational institution.  Surely this Article of Conversion is the true articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae.  When the power of reclaiming the lost dies out of the Church, it ceases to be the Church.  It may remain a useful institution, though it is most likely to become an immoral and mischievous one.  Where the power remains, there, whatever is wanting, it may still be said that “the tabernacle of God is with men.”

One more passage about those who in all Churches and sects think that all that Christ meant by His call was to give them a means to do what the French call faire son salut:—­