cy of its greatest,
most arresting personalities either to revolt from these organisms or to
reform, rekindle them from within. So that the institutional life of
religion persists through or in spite of its own constant tendency to
stiffen and lose fervour, and the secessions, protests, or renewals
which are occasioned by its greatest sons. Thus our Lord protested
against Jewish formalism; many Catholic mystics, and afterwards the best
of the Protestant reformers, against Roman formalism; George Fox against
one type of Protestant formalism; the Oxford movement against another.
This constant antagonism of church and prophet, of institutional
authority and individual vision, is not only true of Christianity but of
all great historical faiths. In the middle ages Kabir and Nanak, and in
our own times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away from and
denounce ceremonial Hinduism: again and again the great Sufis have led
reforms within Islam. That which we are now concerned to discover is the
necessity underlying this conflict: the extent in which the institution
on one hand serves the spiritual life, and on the other cramps or
opposes its free development. It is a truism that all such institutions
tend to degenerate, to become mechanical, and to tyrannize. Are they
then, in spite of these adverse characters, to be looked on as
essential, inevitable, or merely desirable expressions of the spiritual
life in man; or can this spiritual life flourish in pure freedom?

This question, often put in the crucial form, "Did Jesus Christ intend
to form a Church?" is well worth asking. Indeed, it is of great pressing
importance to those who now have the spiritual reconstruction of society
at heart. It means, in practice: can men best be saved, regenerated, one
by one, by their direct responses to the action of the Spirit; or, is
the life of the Spirit best found and actualized through submission to
tradition and contacts with other men--that is, in a group or church?
And if in a group or church, what should the character of this society
be? But we shall make no real movement towards solving this problem,
unless we abandon both the standpoint of authority, and that of naive
religious individualism; and consent to look at it as a part of the
general problem of human society, in the light of history, of
psychology, and of ethics.

I think we may say without exaggeration that the general modern
judgment--not, of course, the clerical or o