courts.
Some minds dwell with joy upon the spiritual Church. Its names are
written on no earthly roster, but in the Book of Life; its worship is
offered in no earthly temple, but in the trysting places where soul
meets Over-soul in trustful fellowship; its baptism is not with water
but with spirit, its eucharist not with bread but with the shared
life of the Lord. Or, ranging out to think of the Church as an ideal
human brotherhood men dream as Manson did in "The Servant in the
House":
"If you have eyes, you will presently see the church itself--a
looming mystery of many shapes and shadows, leaping sheer from floor
to dome. The work of no ordinary builder!... The pillars of it go up
like the brawny trunks of heroes: the sweet human flesh of men and
women is moulded about its bulwarks, strong, impregnable: the faces
of little children laugh out from every corner-stone: the terrible
spans and arches of it are the joined hands of comrades; and up in
the heights and spaces there are inscribed the numberless musings of
all the dreamers of the world. It is yet building--building and built
upon. Sometimes the work goes forward in deep darkness: sometimes in
blinding light: now beneath the burden of unutterable anguish: now to
the tune of a great laughter and heroic shoutings like the cry of
thunder. Sometimes, in the silence of the night-time, one may hear
the tiny hammerings of the comrades at work up in the dome--the
comrades that have climbed ahead."
All such ideals, like pillars of fire and cloud, lead the march toward
a promised land. They are to the actual Church what the poetry of
justice is to the actual courts. But in one case as in the other, such
ideals are dreams if, with labor and struggle, through many mistakes,
against the disheartenment of man's frailty and sin, we do not work
out an institution that shall embody and express man's spiritual life.
Even now a discerning spirit whose own faith has been nourished at the
altar regards the Church with boundless gratitude. She has indeed been
to the Gospel what courts are to justice, indispensable and yet
burdensome, an institution that the ideal cannot live without and yet
often cannot easily live with. No one feels her faults so acutely as
one who devotedly values the Gospel and longs for its adequate
expression on the earth. Yet the Church conserves the race's spiritual
gains, fits out our youth with the treasure of man's accumulated
faith, is a power house of endless moral energy for good causes in the
world, exalts the ideal aims of life amid the crushing pressure of
material pursuits, holds out a gospel of hope to men whom all others
have forsaken, and to the ends of the earth proclaims the good pews of
God and the Kingdom. No other fellowship offers to men of faith so
great an opportunity to make distinctive contribution to the race's
spiritual life. In the presence of the Church's service and the
Church's need an unaffiliated believer in Jesus Christ is an anomaly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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