s
severally pursued in the manner that each required. Not indeed that it
is implied that everything is to be sacrificed to unity. But it is
demanded that the most strenuous endeavours shall be made to maintain
it, and it appears to be assumed that without any breach of it, loyalty
to every other great principle, room for the rightful exercise of every
individual gift, recognition of every aspect of Divine truth the
perception of which may be granted to one or other member of the body,
can be secured, if Christians cultivate right dispositions of mutual
affection and respect.

There is one more point in regard to the idea of the Church in the New
Testament as to which we must not suffer ourselves to be misled, or
confused, by later conceptions and our modern habits of thought. We have
become accustomed to a distinction between the Church Visible and the
Church Invisible which makes of them two different entities. According
to this, one man who is a member of the Church Visible may at the same
time, if he is a truly spiritual person, even while here on earth belong
to the Church Invisible; but another who has a place in the Church
Visible has none and it may be never will have one in the Church
Invisible. This conception, though it had appeared here and there before
the 16th century, first obtained wide vogue then under the influence of
the Protestant Reformation.

It arose through a very natural reaction from the mechanical view of
membership in the Church, its conditions and privileges, which had grown
up in the Middle Ages. But it does not correspond to the ideas of the
Apostolic Age. According to these there is but one Church, the same as
to its true being on earth as it is in heaven, one Body of Christ,
composed of believers in Him who had been taken to their rest and of
those still in this world. In the earlier part of the Apostolic Age the
great majority were in fact still in this world. The Body was chiefly a
Visible Body. It had many imperfections. Some of its members might even
have no true part in it at all and require removal. But Christ Himself
"sanctifies and cleanses it that He may present it"--that very same
Church--"to Himself a glorious Church, without spot or wrinkle or any
such thing, but holy and without blemish[13]."

Now while one can understand the point of view from which in later times
so deep a line of demarcation has been drawn between the Visible and the
Invisible Church as to make of them