the secessions, protests, or renewals which are occasioned by its greatest sons.  Thus our Lord protested against Jewish formalism; many Catholic mystics, and afterwards the best of the Protestant reformers, against Roman formalism; George Fox against one type of Protestant formalism; the Oxford movement against another.  This constant antagonism of church and prophet, of institutional authority and individual vision, is not only true of Christianity but of all great historical faiths.  In the middle ages Kabir and Nanak, and in our own times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away from and denounce ceremonial Hinduism:  again and again the great Sufis have led reforms within Islam.  That which we are now concerned to discover is the necessity underlying this conflict:  the extent in which the institution on one hand serves the spiritual life, and on the other cramps or opposes its free development.  It is a truism that all such institutions tend to degenerate, to become mechanical, and to tyrannize.  Are they then, in spite of these adverse characters, to be looked on as essential, inevitable, or merely desirable expressions of the spiritual life in man; or can this spiritual life flourish in pure freedom?

This question, often put in the crucial form, “Did Jesus Christ intend to form a Church?” is well worth asking.  Indeed, it is of great pressing importance to those who now have the spiritual reconstruction of society at heart.  It means, in practice:  can men best be saved, regenerated, one by one, by their direct responses to the action of the Spirit; or, is the life of the Spirit best found and actualized through submission to tradition and contacts with other men—­that is, in a group or church?  And if in a group or church, what should the character of this society be?  But we shall make no real movement towards solving this problem, unless we abandon both the standpoint of authority, and that of naive religious individualism; and consent to look at it as a part of the general problem of human society, in the light of history, of psychology, and of ethics.

I think we may say without exaggeration that the general modern judgment—­not, of course, the clerical or orthodox judgment—­is adverse to institutionalism; at least as it now exists.  In spite of the enormous improvement which would certainly be visible, were we to compare the average ecclesiastical attitude and average Church service in this country with those of a hundred years ago, the sense that religion involves submission to the rules and discipline of a closed society—­that definite spiritual gains are attached to spiritual incorporation—­that church-going, formal and corporate worship, is a normal and necessary part of the routine of a good life:  all this has certainly ceased to be general amongst us.  If we include the whole population, and not the pious fraction in our view, this is true both of so-called Catholic and so-called Protestant countries.