the Church, we enter on a subject which has filled volumes of controversy, and cannot possibly be discussed within our prescribed limits. I can only indicate in the briefest way the principles which seem to me to lie at the root of the question.

The conditions of membership ought to correspond with the essential character of the religion; and therefore a sincere desire to live under the guidance of the Spirit of God ought to be a sufficient qualification. And so it practically was in the earliest times. Christ himself preached the necessity of repentance, of returning to the purity and simplicity of childhood, of taking up the cross daily and following him. As we have already seen, those who did the will of God were his spiritual kindred; and we have not only no evidence that he insisted on the adoption of an elaborate theological creed or a particular form of ritual, but such insistence is utterly remote from the whole tone and method of his teaching. Even when the Church was more fully constituted, the initial declaration of faith was of the simplest kind, and almost a startling variety of belief was to be found among the disciples; and it was only by slow degrees that the opinions of majorities received the force of irreversible laws, and Paul's

CONDITIONS OF MEMBERSHIP.

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principle that "knowledge passes away," and permanence is to be found only in the Spirit, was contemptuously trodden under foot. From that time Christianity, though never without faithful witnesses, became less and less a religion of the Spirit, more and more a religion of the letter and the form, till things were done in the name of the Gospel which might have sent a tremor of shame through the denizens of hell. But the Spirit is slowly breaking its fetters, and Christ is rising from the tomb in which his professed followers have buried him. The intellect is re-asserting its rights, and finding that Christianity is not a spirit of bondage to fear, but a spirit of sonship which gives a free and exalted life to the noblest powers of the mind.

In regard to the government of the Church, I can only express my own conviction that the idea of a sacred order, clerical or sacerdotal, is quite alien to the original principles of Christianity.2 The general

1 It is sufficient to mention the Inquisition, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the doings of the Spaniards in the Netherlands.

2 I may refer especially to Lightfoot's admirable essay on "The Christian Ministry," in his Epistle to the Philippians. It may be worth while calling attention to the familiar, but disregarded, fact, that neither Jesus himself, nor, so far as we know, any of his

body of believers were "kings and priests to God,"1 enjoying, like the ideal Stoic, a royal freedom and prerogative, and, like the ideal servant of the sanctuary, an immediate communion with the Father. According to the record, Christ expressly forbade his disciples to have any titles of distinction, on the ground that they were all brothers;2 and Paul declared that all were one man in Christ, for all were sons of God.3 Still every society requires officers for the direction and administration of its affairs, and at a comparatively early period the Church was organized agreeably to the system which has prevailed in its largest sections ever since. Such an organization, though I believe it arose out of practical necessities, and took form from existing usages, is perfectly legitimate, and runs counter to the primitive Gospel only when it lays claim to a special divine authority, and invests its officers with clerical or sacerdotal functions. This violation of the earlier idea stole in very naturally from older and less spiritual systems, but has con

Apostles, sprung from the sacerdotal line. Peter and John are expressly called idiŵrai, “laymen” (Acts iv. 13).

1 Rev. i. 6; see also v. 10 and xx. 6.

2 Matt. xxiii. 8 sqq.

3 Gal. iii. 26 sqq.

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tributed not a little to the obscuring, if not the destruction, of some of the grandest principles of Christ's teaching. Its pretensions are refuted, not only by history and interpretation, but by experience; for men of the noblest Christian character are found outside as well as inside the episcopal portions of Christendom. Organization, then, is a matter of convenience, not of prescription; and the Spirit, whose expression and organ it is, may freely adapt it to the wants of different times and places.

A similar remark applies to the observance of ritual. Not only is no particular form of worship enjoined in the earliest documents of Christianity, but principles are laid down which militate against the imposition of any rigid ceremonial. The controlling principle of the movement is expressed in the words, "Neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father. . . . . God is Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth."1 Christians were not to "observe days, and months, and seasons, and years, "2 and were not to allow any man to judge them "in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feastday, or a new moon, or a Sabbath-day."

Christ's

1 John iv. 21, 24.

2 Gal. iv. 10.

3 Col. ii. 16.

own directions might almost seem to forbid the public services of religion: "When ye pray, ye shall not be as the hypocrites: for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.

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When thou fastest, anoint thy head and wash thy face; that thou be not seen of men to fast, but of thy Father which is in secret." Yet as he himself appears to have attended the services of the synagogue, we may fairly take these words, not as a prohibition of all public worship, but as a protest against ostentation and insincerity, and a warning that we must reserve for the eye of God alone those acts of devotion and self-discipline in which we are not uniting with our fellow-men. Here, too, the instincts and requirements of human nature must have free play under the guidance of the Spirit. From the first, Christians have been drawn together in the communion of worship; and thus time and place were necessarily pre-arranged, days and buildings were set apart, and some decorous order of service became requisite. No 1 Matt. vi. 5, 6, 17, 18.

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