VI

THE CHURCH OF CHRIST

There cannot be a question that to some of our friends church membership does not mean much. It does not carry with it the ideas of allegiance and obligation. Religion does not mean primarily piety, but fidelity. There is no faith where there is no faithfulness.

Let us try if we cannot bring ourselves into a more intelligent state of mind in regard to this matter. In order to do so, let us remind ourselves of what the church is. That we may get out of the region of controversy and not go astray, we will take the great apostolic idea "the church which is his body." We are members of his body. This is startling language. Of course it is mystical. It suggests a present union of Christ with his people which is more intimate than any of us realize.

But need we be surprised at such an idea? It is figured to us in Nature. There is no question that the union of the sun with our earth is so intimate that apart from it the earth would be a solid block of ice. A body is the temporary dwelling-place of a spirit. The church is the dwelling-place of Christ's spirit, or, rather, let us put it more strongly and say,

the incarnation of his spirit. Now, a spirit may be in a body which clogs and hinders its free action. With a rheumatic body, or paralyzed body, the spirit in man cannot walk abroad and do deeds of kindness. I don't wonder the old church sexton should say there was something worse than atheism and that was rheumatism. If Christ's spirit has to express itself, do its work in the world, through his body which is the church, its limitations must necessarily be the limitations belonging to the body through which it has to work. So far as this time life of ours is concerned, every truth has to get itself incarnated in some man or woman before it can work. The reason why Dickens' Christmas Carol was so effective was because he took that idea and dramatized it into the crippled Tiny Tim and the heartless Old Scrooge. The apostolic idea of the Christian Church is the body of Christ. All bodies ecclesiastical claiming to be churches have to be tested as to their genuineness by what Christ himself was.

The Church is a teaching body for He was a great teacher. It is a redeeming body, a body which saves souls from death and hides a multitude of sins, for He was a redeemer. It is a consoling body to men afflicted with sins and sorrows, for He was a great consoler. It is a missionary body, for He was a great evangelist, a great missionary. Moreover, can we not add that the Church must expect persecution and misrepresentation, for He was misrepresented and persecuted, and it is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master.

It must expect to suffer for the truth, for He was a sufferer. But in all its misrepresentation and persecution it must cherish the assurance of ultimate victory, for the mark of the Spirit of Christ is this. It may be crucified, apparently, and buried, but it will rise again the third day. There has scarcely been an age in which men have not been talking of Christianity as an exploded superstition and lo, when these conceited intellectualists had got it decently buried, it breaks out again, like a sleeping volcano. Why, as late as 1736, one of the most famous books of the eighteenth century, Butler's Analogy, which was addressed to the deists, has these words at its opening: "It is come, I know now how, to be taken for granted by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry; but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious." The words had scarcely been penned before the country of England was aflame with religious revival. It is so always. The darkest hour of night is that before the dawn. Against the true Church of Christ "the gates of hell shall not prevail." We need be in no doubt as to the spirit and temper of a genuine Christian Church. The sovereignty of Christ over it is absolute and supreme. But like as Judas was in the Church but not of it, so any one of us may be. The temptation of money and its deceitfulness, of fame and its allurements, of pleasure, full of broken promises, may be too much for us. As Demas forsook Paul, because he loved this present age, so it may be with any of us. "Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall." The

condition of church fellowship is fidelity to Christ and the principles of life which he stood for.

A church, then, is a company of faithful, redeemed men, whose sins are forgiven for Christ's sake, spiritually-minded men, obedient to him, pledged to cooperate with one another to bring his kingdom into evidence.

Do we understand this? Or, have we some lower idea of what a church is, and what it exists for? Our Lord, in the most expressive language he could use, said "My Church," as if it was something he had a special ownership in. When a man says "my home," "my wife," "my children," there is an affectionate proprietorship in the language. He has a relationship to these he has not to others. So Christ intimates that while he has such an affection for the whole humanity as no one else ever had, yet there are some for whom he has special affection. They are nearer and dearer to him than are others, just as his disciples were dearer to him than anyone else in Judea and Galilee. These are not ashamed of him. They confess him before men. That confession may be timid, speechless almost; the confession of deeds, not words as with Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who begged the body of Jesus that they might give it honorable burial. Probably they saw him die. Then their last doubts vanished. They may have heard his language on the cross and have felt as the Roman centurion felt, "Truly this was the Son of God!"

Need I say that the confession of Christ before men is of very great value here and now, of much

more value than it will be when we see him in his glory? I was lunching one day in England with an English baronet, when I noticed at the table a man who evidently was not very much used to what is called good society. Afterwards, the baronet or one of his family, I forget which, told me that that man came to any meal in the house whenever he felt disposed. In his youth he had stood by the baronet when they were boys together and everyone had forsaken him. So the baronet now delighted in confessing him as his friend. There will be no courage and no chivalry required to confess the glorified Christ. But here and now the confession has a value it can never have again.

We may test the value of an action by giving it universality. If all men did as I am doing, what would be the condition of the world? If you had no Christians in the world and no Christian Church, witnessing to God's claims and creating Christian conscience and feeling, you would have a perpetual French Revolution, with all its horrors; and the more intelligent men became, the worse it would be. Religion sobers a man. It gives him self-control. In spite of appearances to the contrary, it makes him hopeful that justice and righteousness will eventually triumph, and that if not here, somewhere, every man will get justice done him; that life is not an unordered scramble with no direction and guidance.

If all men were silent as to Christ and his redemptive work, practically there would be no Christ in the world and no redemptive work. There would be some form of superstition. There would be va