induce persons to confess
Jesus as their Lord, to take his name, to become his avowed follower
before the world (i. e. to join his church), were something novel; yet
a church, an assembly of followers, was essential to my idea of
Christianity,--Jesus having said, "Whoever will confess me before men,
him will I confess before my Father who is in heaven," and a king
without a kingdom (or right to a kingdom) being in itself absurd. I
could not help the foreboding that Unitarianism was not a finality or
more than a camp for a night; nay, the question was whether
Unitarianism was not doing more to dissipate Christianity, than to
build it up in any historical sense of the term.

Moreover, Protestant orthodoxy did not have any firm hold on some
fundamental parts and evident implications of the faith I already
held, and was struggling to keep. The idea of the Church itself was
weak in most Protestant mind; they "spiritualized" it, as they said;
but when Jesus spoke of confessing him _before men_, he evidently laid
the foundations of a visible Church. Again, Jesus felt that he spoke
with Divine authority, and as he was commissioned, so he commissioned
others to stand for him before the world, and to speak in his name. He
left them to be his witnesses, to continue his message and his work
after he should be gone. He had the power to forgive sins, for
example, and he conveyed it to others, solemnly saying that whatever
was bound or loosed on earth, should be bound or loosed in heaven. Was
it exactly natural, I asked myself, that divine light and guidance and
forgiveness should be thus present, as it were, on earth for a few
years, and then become entirely a matter of history and antiquarian
research? If there was reason for Jesus' commissioning the apostles,
was there not equal reason for the apostles commissioning others who
should take their places? Protestants said the revelation was in a
book; but Jesus never spoke of a book. If something else was
authoritative in the apostolic days, what absurdity was there in
supposing that something else might be authoritative in later days?
And yet, no Protestant church or synod or council ever claimed to be
such a living witness of God on the earth. The most zealous
Protestants were careful to say that they gave only their human,
fallible interpretations of the distant revelation; that it was even
blasphemous for a man to claim to forgive sins; that the Bible, and
the Bible only, was th