ying
by reminding the demonstrators that if they had any real cause for
complaint, the matter ought to come before the regular _ecclesia_.
This properly constituted _ecclesia_ to which the level-headed town
clerk referred was the general assembly of the citizens for the
transaction of public business.

It was quite natural that the primitive Christians should have come to
adopt this word, and to an extent this very idea, as a convenient
description of the new Christian community. After the departure of
their Master the Christians held together, and wherever their
missionaries went, new communities sprang up, animated by a spirit of
loyalty to Jesus and a desire to realise His ideal for mankind. It was
quite natural, too, that the apostles should recognise all these
communities as being in reality one community for fellowship of faith
and love; it was the _ecclesia_, or assembly, or society of Jesus, the
beginning of the church of Christ, as it soon came to be called. There
was no elaborate organisation; nothing could have been simpler. Every
Christian seems to have thought that as it would not be long before the
Master came again, the wise and right thing to do was for His followers
to hold together and witness Him to the world, until that great event
took place.

+Church only exists for the sake of the kingdom.+--But how far did
Jesus foresee and intend this? It is difficult to say, but his choice
of twelve apostles whom He carefully trained to continue His work is
evidence that He contemplated the formation of some kind of society to
give effect to His teaching. The number twelve points to the
probability that He thought of this society as a kind of new Israel, a
spiritual Israel, which should do for the world what the older Israel
had failed to do, that is, bring about the kingdom of God. I have
already pointed out that in my judgment Jesus did not believe, as His
contemporaries did, that that kingdom could be established suddenly
from without, but held that it could only be achieved by spiritual
forces working from within. His _ecclesia_ has lived and grown. It
has survived for nineteen centuries, and is likely to survive for many
centuries more. It has played a leading part in the making of modern
civilisation. But it is no longer a unity, and many different theories
exist as to its meaning and worth.

_The sacerdotal theory._--Broadly speaking, however, there are two
outstanding views as to the scop