President Wayland: “The universal church comes before the particular church. The society which Christ has established is the foundation of every particular association calling itself a church of Christ.” Andrews, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1883:35‐58, on the conception ἐκκλησία in the N. T., says that “the ‘church’ is the _prius_ of all local ‘churches.’ ἐκκλησία in _Acts 9:31_ = the church, so far as represented in those provinces. It is ecumenical‐local, as in _1 Cor. 10:33_. The local church is a microcosm, a specialized localization of the universal body. קהל, in the O. T. and in the Targums, means the whole congregation of Israel, and then secondarily those local bodies which were parts and representations of the whole. Christ, using Aramaic, probably used קהל in _Mat. 18:17_. He took his idea of the church from it, not from the heathen use of the word ἐκκλησία, which expresses the notion of locality and state much more than קהל. The larger sense of ἐκκλησία is the primary. Local churches are points of consciousness and activity for the great all‐inclusive unit, and they are not themselves the units for an ecclesiastical aggregate. They are faces, not parts of the one church.” Christ, in _Mat. 18:17_, delegates authority to the whole congregation of believers, and at the same time limits authority to the local church. The local church is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of the kingdom. Unity is not to be that of merely local churches, but that of the kingdom, and that kingdom is internal, “_cometh not with observation_” (_Luke 17:20_), but consists in “_righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit_” (_Rom. 14:17_). The word “church,” in the universal sense, is not employed by any other N. T. writer before Paul. Paul was interested, not simply in individual conversions, but in the growth of the church of God, as the body of Christ. He held to the unity of all local churches with the mother church at Jerusalem. The church in a city or in a house is merely a local manifestation of the one universal church and derived its dignity therefrom. Teaching of the Twelve Apostles: “As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains, and being gathered became one, so may thy church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom.”