The first cause to which I call attention is an erroneous conception of the church itself. At the cost of some repetition I must point out that in the beginning the church was the universal company of the redeemed, the whole _spiritual brotherhood_, whether isolated members of Christ or those worshiping in local assemblies distributed over the earth. The tie which united these members of Christ in one body was their common faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and the life of the Spirit. But as in those times vast centralized imperial power was a divinity that every one worshiped, it was impossible properly to appreciate _the moral and spiritual dominion_ of Christ by which alone he designed to rule his church; therefore men soon proceeded to pattern the church of Christ after the political government, first by grouping together under one administrative human headship the congregations of a province or section of the empire, and then finally uniting these different provinces under one administrative headship at Rome. From that day until the present time the church-idea that has generally prevailed in Christendom has been an organization fashioned according to the kingdoms of this world; a human organization in which the administrative functions of government are centralized under some form of human headship; a unity that is not moral and spiritual, but official and administrative, as well as legislative and judicial. [Sidenote: Wrong standard of church-membership] Coincident with the creation of foreign ideals concerning church societies was the formation of of a foreign idea of church-membership and church-relationship. In the beginning, as we have shown, the church was simply the divine family. Therefore salvation through Christ was its sole condition of membership. "And the Lord added to them day by day those that were being saved" (Acts 2:47, R.V.). And as the local congregation was but the concrete expression of the ideals of the general body or church, that membership in Christ which made men members of the general body, made them, by a moral and spiritual law, members of all the other members of Christ, and therefore fixed their local relationship: they belonged by divine right with whichever company of believers they happened to be associated. Nothing more than simple recognition of what God had done for them and the according to them of the local rights and privileges that naturally belonged to them was necessary on the part of a local congregation to make the actual union complete.