newspapers and publishing-houses and campaigns of lectures.
A learned man may do something by himself for his children or his
friends; but he can do incomparably more for a larger public if he is
associated with other learned men in a faculty, assisted by the
publications of the press, and receives pupils already prepared by other
teachers to appreciate his particular contribution. An earnest believer
can accomplish something by himself for the immediate circle of lives
about him; but he is immeasurably more influential when he invests his
inspired personality in the Church, where he finds his efforts for the
Kingdom supplemented by the work of countless fellow toilers, where the
missionary enterprise bears the impetus of his consecration to
thousands he can never see face to face, and where a lasting institution
carries on his life-work and conserves its results long after he has
passed from earth.

The Christian is dependent upon the Church for his birth, his growth,
his usefulness; and this Christian community, or Church, like the
intellectual community, instinctively organizes itself to spread its
life. There is an unorganized Church, in the sense of the spiritual
community, which shares the life of Christ with God and man, as there is
an unorganized intellectual community of more or less educated persons
who possess the mental acquisitions of the race. But this intellectual
community would lose its vitality without its educational agencies; and
the spiritual community would all but die were it not for its
institutions. The spiritual community is the Church; it is organized in
the churches.

As Christians we look back to discover Jesus' conception of the Church.
We find it implicit in His life rather than explicit in His teaching. He
was born into the Jewish Church which in His day was organized with its
Temple and priesthood at Jerusalem, with its Sanhedrin settling its law
and doctrine, with its synagogues with their worship and instruction in
every town and a ministry of trained scribes, and with a wider
missionary undertaking that was spreading the Jewish faith through the
Roman world. It was a community with its sectarian divisions of
Sadducees, Pharisees and the like, but unified by a common devotion to
the one God of Israel and His law. Jesus' personal faith was born of
this Church, grew and kept vigorous by continuous contact with it, and
sought to work through its organization, for He taught in the synagog