CHAPTER VII

THE CHURCH

No man’s spiritual life starts with himself; there is no Melchizedek soul—­without father or mother.  As our bodies are born of the bodies of others, as our minds are formed from the mental heritage of the race, our faith is the offspring of the faith of others; and we owe a filial debt to the Christian society from which we derive our life with God.

Nor is any man’s spiritual experience self-sustaining.  Our mental vitality diminishes if we do not keep in touch with thinking people; and brilliant men often lose their lustre for want of intellectual companionship.  “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.”  A Christian’s religious experience requires fellowship for its enrichment, and no large soul was ever grown or maintained in isolation.  We are enlarged by sharing the wealthier spiritual life of the whole believing community.

Nor can a religious man contribute his spiritual endowment to the world without joining with kindred souls in an organized effort.  Edward Rowland Sill, speaking of his spiritual isolation, wrote to a friend:  “For my part I long to ‘fall in’ with somebody.  This picket duty is monotonous.  I hanker after a shoulder on this side and the other.”  The intellectual life of the community organizes itself in schools and colleges, in newspapers and publishing-houses and campaigns of lectures.  A learned man may do something by himself for his children or his friends; but he can do incomparably more for a larger public if he is associated with other learned men in a faculty, assisted by the publications of the press, and receives pupils already prepared by other teachers to appreciate his particular contribution.  An earnest believer can accomplish something by himself for the immediate circle of lives about him; but he is immeasurably more influential when he invests his inspired personality in the Church, where he finds his efforts for the Kingdom supplemented by the work of countless fellow toilers, where the missionary enterprise bears the impetus of his consecration to thousands he can never see face to face, and where a lasting institution carries on his life-work and conserves its results long after he has passed from earth.

The Christian is dependent upon the Church for his birth, his growth, his usefulness; and this Christian community, or Church, like the intellectual community, instinctively organizes itself to spread its life.  There is an unorganized Church, in the sense of the spiritual community, which shares the life of Christ with God and man, as there is an unorganized intellectual community of more or less educated persons who possess the mental acquisitions of the race.  But this intellectual community would lose its vitality without its educational agencies; and the spiritual community would all but die were it not for its institutions.  The spiritual community is the Church; it is organized in the churches.