I have thus ventured to bring the condition of the church as a body before our minds, although well knowing how much more we are concerned with the state of our own souls individually.  Yet still the more general view is not without great use; and indeed it bears directly upon our individual state:  our actions and our feelings having often a close connexion with, general church matters; and these actions and feelings being necessarily good or bad, according to the soundness of our judgment on the matter which occasions them.  Besides which, it seems to me that general views, rather than what relates to particular faults, may be with most propriety dwelt on by those who have no direct connexion with the congregation which they are addressing.

In the first place, then, whenever we think of the state and prospects of Christ’s church, whether for good or for evil, it is most desirable that we should rightly understand our own relations to it.  “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel;” or, in the language of the New Testament, “Christ is the vine, and we are the branches.”  Men continually seem to forget that they are members of the church; citizens, to use St. Paul’s expression, of Christ’s kingdom, as much as ever they are citizens of their earthly country.  But they speak of the church as they might speak of any useful institution or society in their neighbourhood, whose object they approved of, and which they were glad to encourage, but without becoming members of it, or identifying themselves with its success or failure.  For example, they speak of the church as they might speak of the universities, which indeed are institutions of great importance to the whole country, but yet they are manifestly distinct from the mass of the community:  they have their own members, their own laws, and their own government, with which, people in general have nothing to do.  And so many persons speak and feel of the church, regarding it evidently as consisting only of the clergy:  our common language, no doubt, helping this confusion, because we often speak of a man’s going into the church when he enters into holy orders, just as if ordination were the admission into the church, and not baptism.  Now, if the clergy did indeed constitute the church, then it would very much resemble the condition of the universities:  for it would then be indeed a society very important to the welfare of the whole country, but yet one that was completely distinct, and which had its members, laws, and government quite apart:  for men in general do not belong to the clergy, nor are they concerned directly in such canons as relate to the peculiar business of the clergy, nor does the bishop’s superintendence, as commonly exercised, extend at all to them.  But God designed for his church far more than that it should contain one order of men only, or that it should comprise commonly but one single individual in a parish, preaching to and teaching the rest of the inhabitants, like a missionary amongst