If I travel in distant lands, my passport is the sign that all the power of these United States is pledged to protect me from injustice.  Think of the sensitiveness of governments to any wrong done to their private citizens.  England went to war with Abyssinia to protect and deliver two Englishmen.  And shall God do less?  Can he do less?  If it is only just and right and necessary for earthly governments to thus care for their citizens, shall not the ruler and “judge of all the earth do right?”

Now you and I are commanded to be heirs of God, to attain to likeness to him.  This is therefore our legal right, guaranteed by him, for every command of God is really a promise.  And he will exhaust every power in the universe before he allows anything to prevent us from gaining our legal rights, provided only that we are earnest in claiming them.

But if I alienate my rights to my inheritance, the commonwealth cannot help me.  If I renounce my citizenship, the government of the United States can no longer protect me.  And so I can alienate my “right to the tree of life,” and to entrance into the city, and I can forfeit my heirship to all that God would give me.  “For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  But I can alienate and make void every promise and title, if I will or if I do not care.  This is the unique glory, and awfulness of the human will.  And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good.  “If God is for us who is against us?” It must be so if God’s laws are his modes of aiding men to conform to environment.

And what of the church?  Is it anything else or other than a means of aiding man to conform to environment?  If it fails of this, can it be any longer the church of God?  The church is a means, not an end.  And it is a means of godlikeness in man.

Some would make it a social club.  The bond of union between its members is their common grade of wealth, social position, or intellectual attainments.  And this idea of the church has deeper root in the minds of us all than we think.  I can imagine a far better club than one formed and framed on this principle, but it is difficult for me to imagine a worse counterfeit of a church.  Others make it a source of intellectual delectation, and the means of hearing one or two striking sermons each week.  Such a church will conduce to the intelligence of its members, and may be rather more, though probably less, useful than the old New England Lyceum lecture system.  Such a church is of about as much practical value to the world at large as some consultations of physicians are to their patients.  The doctors have a most interesting discussion, but the patient dies, and the nature of the disease is discovered at