The alpha and omega of Christ's message is rebirth into the knowledge
of that Spirit, and hence submission to its guidance. And that is what
Paul meant when he said that it freed us from the law. You are right,
Alison, when you declare it to be a violation of the Spirit for a man
and woman to live together when love does not exist. Christ shows us
that laws were made for those who are not reborn. Laws are the rules of
society, to be followed by those who have not found the inner guidance,
who live and die in the flesh. But the path which those who live under
the control of the Spirit are to take is opened up to them as they
journey. If all men and women were reborn we should have the paradox,
which only the reborn can understand, of what is best for the individual
being best for society, because under the will of the Spirit none can
transgress upon the rights and happiness of others. The Spirit would
make the laws and rules superfluous.

"And the great crime of the Church, for which she is paying so heavy
an expiation, is that her faith wavered, and she forsook the Spirit and
resumed the law her Master had condemned. She no longer insisted on that
which Christ proclaimed as imperative, rebirth. She became, as you say,
a mechanical organization, substituting, as the Jews had done, hard and
fast rules for inspiration. She abandoned the Communion of Saints, sold
her birthright for a mess of pottage, for worldly, temporal power when
she declared that inspiration had ceased with the Apostles, when she
failed to see that inspiration is personal, and comes through rebirth.
For the sake of increasing her membership, of dominating the affairs of
men, she has permitted millions who lived in the law and the flesh, who
persisted in forcing men to live by the conventions and customs Christ
repudiated, and so stultify themselves, to act in Christ's name.
The unpardonable sin against the Spirit is to doubt its workings, to
maintain that society will be ruined if it be substituted for the
rules and regulations supposed to make for the material comforts of the
nations, but which in reality suppress and enslave the weak.

"Nevertheless in spite of the Church, marvellously through the Church
the germ of our Lord's message has come down to us, and the age in which
we live is beginning to realize its purport, to condemn the Church for
her subservient rationalism.

"Let us apply the rule of the Spirit to marriage. If we examine the
ideal w