The spiritual life of men is not limited to this planet, and the fulfilment of the Church’s task can never be here alone. The Church must call men from temporal to eternal hopes. But in this way it will do more than is possible in any other way to purify the temporal life itself. For most temporal goods are such that the more one person has the less there is for others, so that absorption in them leads inevitably to strife and war. But the eternal goods—love, joy, peace, loyalty, beauty, knowledge—are such that the fuller fruition of them by one leads of itself to fuller fruition by others also, and absorption in them leads without fail to brotherhood and fellowship. It is not of worship, the breath of the church’s life, but of service, the business of its life, that I wish to speak. But this can only be misleading if the other has not first been given prominence. The Church serves because it first worships. Only because it has in itself a foretaste of eternal life, the realised Kingdom of God, can it prepare the way of the Lord, so that His Kingdom may come on earth as it is in heaven. One question which demands attention concerns the nature of the Church which is to perform this function. Is it enough that there should be vast numbers of Christian individuals gathering together in whatever way is proved by experience to be the most effective for edification, pursuing their profession as Christians, and so gradually leavening life? Or is there need for a quite definite society, with a coherent constitution and a known basis of membership? The former has much to recommend it; it avoids the deadening influence of a rigid machinery; it ensures freedom of spiritual and intellectual development; it may seem to correspond with that loosely constituted group of disciples, which was, as we have seen, the actual fruit of the earthly ministry of Christ. Yet it is condemned by all analogies, and is inadequate to the essential nature of religion. All relevant analogy suggests that a spirit must take definite and concrete form before it can be effective in the world, even as God Himself must become incarnate in order to establish His Kingdom upon earth. No doubt the form has often fettered the spirit and sometimes even perverted it; the history of the Franciscan movement is an instance of this; but the influence of St. Francis would never have done for Europe what it actually accomplished if the Order had not been founded.