freshness of discovery; the tendency to exalt the corporate and stable
and discount the mobile and individual. Its natural instinct will be for
exclusivism, the club-idea, conservatism and cosiness; it will, if left
to itself, revel in the middle-aged atmosphere and exhibit the
middle-aged point of view.

We can now consider these points in greater detail: and first that of
the religious group-consciousness which a church should give its
members. This is of a special kind. It is axiomatic that
group-organization of some sort is a necessity of human life. History
showed us the tendency of all spiritual movements to embody themselves,
if not in churches at least in some group-form; the paradox of each
successive revolt from a narrow or decadent institutionalism forming a
group in its turn, or perishing when its first fervour died. But this
social impulse, these spontaneous group-formations of master and
disciples, valuable though they may be, do not fully exhibit all that is
meant or done by a church. True, the Church is or should be at each
moment of its career such a living spiritual society or household of
faith. It is, essentially, a community of persons, who have or should
have a common sentiment--belief in, and reverence for, their God--and a
common defined aim, the furtherance of the spiritual life under the
special religious sanctions which they accept. But every sect, every
religious order or guild, every class-meeting, might claim this much;
yet none of these can claim to be a church.

A church is far more than this. In so far as it is truly alive, it is a
real organism, as distinguished from a crowd or collection of persons
with a common purpose. It exhibits on the religious plane the ruling
characters of such organized life: that is to say, the development of
tradition and complex habits, the differentiation of function, the