In this chapter I shall undertake to sketch the plan of a religious society as determined by the spiritual ideal herein set forth. The religious society is the last term in the series of social institutions, and its peculiar office is to furnish the principle for the successive transformation of the entire series. It is to be the laboratory in which the ideal of the spiritual universe is created and constantly recreated, the womb in which the spiritual life is conceived. No single religious society can adequately fulfill this purpose. The spiritual ideal itself must necessarily be conceived differently by different minds; but the great general purpose will be the same, despite variations in shades of meaning and points of view. The fellowship of the religious society must be based on the voluntary principle; membership must be a matter of free choice.[100] In antiquity the boundaries of the political and religious organizations coincided. The citizen was under obligations as a part of his civic duty to worship the divinities of the state. In modern times a state church is still maintained in some countries and supported out of the public funds, while dissenting and nonconformist bodies exist more or less on sufferance at its side. But this arrangement is harmful, especially so to those whom it seems to favor. Erastianism paralyzes religious spontaneity. The state, it is true, is profoundly interested in the flourishing of ethical idealism, and in the constant rebirth in its midst of spiritual ideals. But it is not competent to determine what the character of these ideals shall be. The moment they cease to be freely produced they lose their life-giving power. The state within limits may enforce actions; it may not even attempt to enforce beliefs. On the other hand, the “secularization of the state” has given rise to the deplorable impression that the state exists only for so-called secular purposes, and has stripped the idea of the state of the lofty attributes with which the greatest thinkers of antiquity had clothed it. It is the function of the religious society, dwelling uncoerced in the midst of the state, to reinvest the state with the sacred character that belongs to it. I do not of course intend to exalt the state after the manner of Hegel, as if it were a kind of earthly god or to set it up as an object of religious or quasi-religious devotion. The object of religious devotion is the infinite holy community, the spiritual universe. The function of the religious society is to generate the ideal of the infinite holy community, of the spiritual universe. The family, the vocation, the nation, are sub-groups of this, lesser entities. Even mankind itself is but a province of the ideal spiritual commonwealth that extends beyond it. To concentrate worship upon the state or nation as some propose, would be to usurp for the part the piety that belongs to the whole. In describing a religious society three main aspects are to be borne in mind: