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nels; there was no outward break with the synagogue. Moreover the current faith in the impending parousia was unfavorable to immediate and elaborate organization. The Apostolic Church was on tip-toe with expectation. The consummation of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth was to be catastrophic. And if Christ was to reappear before their generation had passed away, there was manifestly little or no reason for any ecclesiastical organization. Hence while their animating spirit was revolutionized, the organization remained practically unchanged. New life, not new forms, characterized the early church; not liturgies, creeds, or polities, but faith in Jesus Christ as the living Messiah, faith in the possibility and reality of the soul's communion with God, and faith in the beauty and duty of holiness.

Then two epoch-making events occurred, Paul's conversion and subsequent career, and the destruction of Jerusalem. It was Paul who broke with the synagogue; he proclaimed that Christ is the end of the law, and the beginning of a new covenant; that Jesus is the Lord of Jew and Gentile; that direct communion with God rendered unnecessary the old Jewish cult of priests and ceremonies, that the bond of the new spirit which binds the disciples of Jesus into a brotherblood is stronger than the ties of blood, of custom and nationality. The results of his activity were far-reaching. The new wine burst the old wine-skins and the new life began to seek and find new forms of expression. This Pauline achievement found a potent ally in the destruction of Jerusalem. Henceforth the Jews were a homeless people without an organized religion. Christianity in its earliest infancy was thus by the preaching of Paul and by the destruction of Jerusalem thrown out of its cradle and thrust out of its home. It became more Gentile than Jewish. By a gradual and inevitable process the new life fashioned for its use new forms; such forms men neither improvise nor invent, they grow historically. They are in part the expression of inward impulses in response to concrete demands, and in part the adaptation and transformation of external tendencies and factors.

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In turning to the New Testament literature we find that Paul uses the word church much more frequently than the term "Kingdom of Heaven or Kingdom of God." And in the use of the latter the eschatological meaning predominates; the kingdom is the consummation of the church realized at the parousia, the church is the name for the Christian society in the intermediate time. It is noteworthy that in the Pauline literature this conception of the church undergoes a magnificent development. It seems that in his earlier Epistles, while Paul was under the spell of the parousia hope, his church conception naturally fell into the background. But as the parousia hope lost its hold upon Paul, and the expectation of the catastrophic consummation faded from his view, the conception of the church was lifted into prominence, and the achievement of the ultimate goal of history, the consummation of the kingdom, is accomplished in and through the church whose head is Christ. This church in Paul's day consisted of many widely-separated congregations. Outward unity there. was none; formal organization there was but little, and that little was local, but as the body of Christ they had a spiritual unity, consisting of common truth and common life. This is Paul's conception of the church in Ephesians, and virtually it coincides with his idea of the Kingdom of God as used in earlier epistles. The church as here conceived by Paul recognizes no special polity; fixes no institutional forms; claims no sacramental grace, nor the orders that are its channels. It is constituted by God in Christ and is composed of the "called," the men of love and peace.

Thus Paul laid the foundation for the great church of history. It was a tremendous achievement, says Harnack. Without injury to the essential life of the Gospel, which consisted in filial trust in God as the Father of Jesus Christ, in faith in the Lord, in forgiveness of sins, in certainty of eternal life, and purity and brotherliness, he liberated it from its Jewish limitations, and interpreted it as the universal religion. Thus he became the founder of the Gentile Christian church.

If any one, says Renan, had told the Roman Emperor of the First Century that the little Jew, who went forth as a missionary from Antioch, was his most powerful ally, who would place the empire on a firm foundation, he would have been declared mad. And yet, such was the case. Paul saw in Rome the incarnation of the world-power whom Christ had gone forth to conquer; and Rome bent all its vast energies to destroy the Christian religion, in which it instinctively recognized its deadly enemy, The two joined issue, and the history of the Christian Church from Paul's time to the period of the Reformation is the story of the way in which the Christian spirit transformed the pagan institutions, and the way in which pagan institutions became the procrustean bed for the Christian spirit. And the result, in the middle ages, was a world in part Christian, and a church in part worldly. The limits of this paper make it impossible, and happily, the work of modern scholars renders it unnecessary, to trace here in detail this stupendous historic process. Suffice it to say that Jew, Greek, Roman, each saw the new ideal of the Gospel of Jesus against the background of his own national experience, and recognized in it the counterpart and the fulfillment of his own highest hopes. The historic occasion for the fixed and formal organization of the church into a corporation claiming to be the recipient of authority from Christ to lord it over the religious faith and doctrine of men, possessing the means. of grace and the keys of heaven, was furnished by gnosticism. The age-long strife of the church with this subtle heresy forced it to give a definite formulation to its doctrine, its worship, and its discipline, and to exclude from this organization all who refused to render homage and obedience to it. The elements which entered into this elaborate scheme of organization were chiefly four: Greek philosophy, Stoic morality, Roman polity, and the Oriental mysticism of the current popular religion.

The historian standing on the threshold of the Sixteenth Century views with amazement the stupendous structure of

the Roman Catholic Church. Whence is it, and what is it? Is this the logical expression into concrete form of the spirit of Jesus; is this the lineal and historic heir of the Apostolic Brotherhood whose sole bond of union was loyalty to Jesus and kinship of spirit? Surely a deeper contrast cannot be imagined than that between the spirit of Christ and the spirit of His church in the middle ages. "A beautiful legend of this epoch illustrates this contrast: According to this legend Jesus Christ comes back upon the earth and shows himself at a great auto-da-fe in Seville, where hundreds of heretics are burnt in His honor. He walks about in the ashes of the martyrs; the common people throng about Him, and He blesses them. The chief inquisitor causes Him to be arrested, and at midnight he visits Him in His cell. 'You are wrong,' says the Inquisitor, in coming again to the earth to interfere in the work of your church. You were wrong not to accept the offer of the tempter, wrong to undertake to convert society by silent and spiritual forces. There are but three forces on earth, which can keep humanity in check; the miracle, the mystery, and the authority. You have rejected them all to proclaim a freedom and a love for which humanity is not ready. It has been necessary for us to correct your work and supplement it with the sword of Cæsar. You, also, to-morrow shall be burned. You shall not be permitted to interfere with the work of your church.' Christ answers not a word, looks into the eyes of the Inquisitor with mild, familiar gaze, and then stoops and kisses the old man on his bloodless mouth. The old man trembles, opens the door, and then bids the Master depart, never to return."

Never to return? Jesus has never been absent from His church. As of old, upon the troubled sea of Galilee, so through the ages Christ has been walking upon the tumultuous waves of the history of the church. Her shame is the shame of unchristian elements within her, but her glory is the glory of Christ. The Reformation, viewed as an ecclesiastical movement, was a mighty protest in the name of Christ against

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the paganized church. Wherever the holy soul is" said Luther, "there is the church, whether under the papacy or amidst the Turks." Well said! But alas, soon this divine and transcendental conception again sought and found its own body. As the Catholic church was Christian in its name and pagan in its life, so the new church was protestant in spirit but remained largely Roman in its organized form. It did not return absolutely to the spirit, the temper and the purpose of the Christ. That was not doctrinal, not sacramental, not institutional. It did not make Jesus Christ as a personal and living Saviour and Master, its centre, nor was it content to make loyalty to Him, kinship with His spirit, the only condition of membership, and the only bond of union. It did not fashion the church into the Bride of the Lamb; the shrine of the religion of the Spirit, the incarnation of the eternal Love of God, which serves people, and by serving lifts them.

III. The Church of the Future.-What of the future? In speaking of the church of the future it would be folly to do what Christ did not, and could not do, viz.: to anticipate the form in and through which the life of the Spirit will seek and find its adequate expression. However, it is clear first, that the organized body of Jesus Christ will in the future return to the Creative Head for the determinative constitutive regulative, principle of its life. It will find the principle of its faith, its worship, and its polity, not in Greek Philosophy, nor in Pagan Mysticism, nor in Roman Absolutism, but in Jesus Christ. Secondly, those who tell us that the church is passing away, that it will never again play a great part in the life of the world, that literature is superseding it, that science is supplanting it, the hosts of pessimists within, and of antagonists without the church are doomed to disappointment.

There will be a church of the future, the One Holy Catholic Church. It will be One church, united not in a leaden uniformity of opinion and practice, but one in its life, based on its loyalty to Jesus Christ. It will be Catholic, because its recognition of the Fatherliness of God will link all nations and

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