exclusive of all types of institution. It is only because we are so
accustomed to this--taking churches for granted, even when we reject
them--that we do not see how odd they really are: how curious it is that
men do not set up exclusive and mutually hostile clubs full of rules and
regulations to enjoy the light of the sun in particular times and
fashions, but do persistently set up such exclusives clubs full of rules
and regulations, so to enjoy the free Spirit of God.

When we look into history we see the life of the Spirit, even from its
crudest beginnings, closely associated with two movements. First with
the tendency to organize it in communities or churches, living under
special sanctions and rules. Next, with the tendency of its greatest,
most arresting personalities either to revolt from these organisms or to
reform, rekindle them from within. So that the institutional life of
religion persists through or in spite of its own constant tendency to
stiffen and lose fervour, and the secessions, protests, or renewals
which are occasioned by its greatest sons. Thus our Lord protested
against Jewish formalism; many Catholic mystics, and afterwards the best
of the Protestant reformers, against Roman formalism; George Fox against
one type of Protestant formalism; the Oxford movement against another.
This constant antagonism of church and prophet, of institutional
authority and individual vision, is not only true of Christianity but of
all great historical faiths. In the middle ages Kabir and Nanak, and in
our own times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away from and
denounce ceremonial Hinduism: again and again the great Sufis have led
reforms within Islam. That which we are now concerned to discover is the
necessity underlying this conflict: the extent in which the institution
on one hand serves the spiritual life, and on the other cramps or
opposes its free development. It is a truism that all such institutions
tend to degenerate, to become mechanical, and to tyrannize. Are they