ng at enmity with God, and of the duty of the church to
persuade as many as possible to believe something or other in order to
secure salvation in a future and better world, has been held by
sacerdotalists and non-sacerdotalists, Catholics and Protestants alike.
It is still implied in most of our preaching and in the hymns we sing.
I admit that there is a certain truth in it, the truth that man is
constituted for immortality and ought not to live as if this world were
all that mattered. But on the whole, it has been thoroughly
mischievous, and there is nothing which is acting as a greater
hindrance to the spirituality and usefulness of the churches to-day.
It is based on an entirely false idea as to the relation of God and the
world.

+To save the world.+--But alongside of this view a far higher and
nobler one has been present to the minds of Christians in every
century, namely, that the work of the church is to save the world and
to believe that it is worth the saving. If what I have already said be
true, this is the idea which was in the mind of Jesus when He founded
His _ecclesia_. To Him the purpose of the _ecclesia_ was to help to
realise the kingdom of God by preaching and living the fellowship of
love. Ever since His day those who have been nearest to Him in spirit
have been going forth into the dark places of the earth trying to win
men to the realisation of the great ideal of a universal fellowship of
love based on a common relationship to the God and Father of us all.
This is what Augustine aimed at in his City of God. It was what
Ambrose had in mind when he excommunicated the emperor Theodosius for
having ordered a cruel massacre of some of his rebellious subjects. It
was the ideal of the mighty Hildebrand, grim and arrogant though he
was, when he compelled princes to bow their haughty necks and do
justice to the weak. It was what Bernard of Clairvaux meant to declare
when he defied the cruel and sensual king of France to approach the
altar of Christ. Savonarola realised it for a brief moment in
Florence, Calvin in Geneva, the Covenanters in Scotland, the Puritans
in England, the Pilgrim Fathers in America. They all failed because
the world can never be saved by the imposition of ideal institutions
from without and by force; it can only be by the spirit of Christ
working from within. But to some extent they all succeeded, too, for
the world is a better place to live in because of the gradual and
cu