Incidentally meantime, the Apostle, in this passage which so curbs "the strong," lets fall maxims which for ever protect all that is good and true in that well-worn and often misused phrase, "the right of private judgment." No spiritual despot, no claimant to be the autocratic director of a conscience, could have written those words, "_Let every man be quite certain in his own mind_"; "_Who art thou that judgest Another's domestic?_" Such sentences assert not the right so much as _the duty_, for the individual Christian, of a reverent "_thinking for himself_." They maintain a true and noble individualism. And there is a special need just now in the Church to remember, _in its place_, the value of Christian individualism. The idea of the community, the society, is just now so vastly prevalent (doubtless not without the providence of God) in human life, and also in the Church, that an assertion of the individual, which was once disproportionate, is now often necessary, lest the social idea in its turn should be exaggerated into a dangerous mistake. Coherence, mutuality, the truth of the Body and the Members; all this, _in its place_, is not only important but divine. The individual must inevitably lose where individualism is his whole idea. But it is ill for the community, above all for the Church, where in the total the individual tends really to be merged and lost. Alas for the Church where the Church tries to take the individual's place in the knowledge of God, in the love of Christ, in the power of the Spirit. The religious Community must indeed inevitably lose where religious communism is its whole idea. It can be perfectly strong only where individual consciences are tender, and enlightened; where individual souls personally know God in Christ; where individual wills are ready, if the Lord call, to stand alone for known truth even against the religious Society;--if there also the individualism is not self-will, but Christian personal responsibility; if the man "thinks for himself" _on his knees_; if he reverences the individualism of others, and the relations of each to all. The individualism of Rom. xiv., asserted in an argument full of the deepest secrets of cohesion, is the holy and healthful thing it is because it is _Christian_. It is developed not by the assertion of self, but by individual communion with Christ. Now he goes on to further and still fuller statements in the same direction: