is external wholly and has nothing in common with that authority which free men erect over themselves because it is themselves embodied in an outward principle.  If personality has any place in the soul, if the soul has any original office, then the authority that religion as an organic social form may take on must lie within limits that reserve to the soul its privacy with God, to truth an un-borrowed radiance, and to all men its possession, simple or learned, lay or cleric, through their common experience and ordinary faculties in the normal course of life.  Otherwise, it seems to me, personal experience cannot be the beginning of Christian conviction, the true available test of it, the underlying basis of it as we build the temple of God’s presence within us, and, as I have called it, the vitality of the whole matter.

“Within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier argument, what, under such reserves of the great principles of liberty, democracy, and justice in which we are bred and which are forms of the cardinal fact of the value of the personal soul in all men,—­what to us is the office of the Church?  In theology it defines a philosophy which, though an interpretation of divine truth, takes its place in the intellectual scheme of theory like other human philosophies, and has a similar value, differing only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which is the most mysterious known to thought.  In its specific rites it dignifies the great moments of life—­birth, marriage, and death—­with its solemn sanctions; and in its general ceremonies it affords appropriate forms in which religious emotion finds noble and tender expression; especially it enables masses of men to unite in one great act of the heart with the impressiveness that belongs to the act of a community, and to make that act, though emotional in a multitude of hearts, single and whole in manifestation; and it does this habitually in the life of its least groups by Sabbath observances, and in the life of nations by public thanksgivings, and in the life of entire Christendom by its general feasts of Christmas and Easter, and, though within narrower limits, by its seasons of fasting and prayer.  In its administration it facilitates its daily work among men.  The Church is thus a mighty organizer of thought in theology, of the forms of emotion in its ritual, and of practical action in its executive.  Its doctrines, however conflicting in various divisions of the whole vast body, are the result of profound, conscientious, and long-continued thought among its successive synods, which are the custodians of creeds as senates are of constitutions, and whose affirmations and interpretations have a like weight in their own speculative sphere as these possess in the province of political thought age after age.  Its counsels are ripe with a many-centuried knowledge of human nature.  Its joys and consolations are the most precious inheritance of the heart of man.  Its saints open our pathways, and go before,