though indirectly, from some institutional source.

On the other hand the institution, since it represents the element of
stability in life, does not give, and must not be expected to give,
direct spiritual experience; or any onward push towards novelty,
freshness of discovery and interpretation in the spiritual sphere. Its
dangers and limitations will abide in a certain dislike of such
freshness of discovery; the tendency to exalt the corporate and stable
and discount the mobile and individual. Its natural instinct will be for
exclusivism, the club-idea, conservatism and cosiness; it will, if left
to itself, revel in the middle-aged atmosphere and exhibit the
middle-aged point of view.

We can now consider these points in greater detail: and first that of
the religious group-consciousness which a church should give its
members. This is of a special kind. It is axiomatic that
group-organization of some sort is a necessity of human life. History
showed us the tendency of all spiritual movements to embody themselves,
if not in churches at least in some group-form; the paradox of each
successive revolt from a narrow or decadent institutionalism forming a
group in its turn, or perishing when its first fervour died. But this
social impulse, these spontaneous group-formations of master and
disciples, valuable though they may be, do not fully exhibit all that is
meant or done by a church. True, the Church is or should be at each
moment of its career such a living spiritual society or household of
faith. It is, essentially, a community of persons, who have or should
have a common sentiment--belief in, and reverence for, their God--and a
common defined aim, the furtherance of the spiritual life under the
special religious sanctions which they accept. But every sect, every
religious order or guild, every class-meeting, might claim this much;
yet none of these can claim to be a church.

A church is far more than this. In so far as it is truly alive, it is a
real organism, as distinguished from a crowd or collection of persons
with a common purpose. It exhibits on the religious plane the ruling
characters of such organized life: that is to say, the development of
tradition and complex habits, the differentiation of function, the
docility to leadership, the conservation of values, or carrying forward
of the past into the present. It is, like the State, embodied history;
and as such lives with its own life, a life transcending and