e brethren.
The early Christians earnestly believed that their life was "hidden with
Christ in God" (Col. iii. 3), and found in their union with Christ the
lasting and strongest motive of love to the brethren. Such fellowship is
attributed by St Paul pre-eminently to the work of the Holy Spirit (2
Cor. xiii. 14). Its strength is shown in England in the growing
readiness of the different religious bodies to co-operate in movements
for the purifying of public morality and for the better observance of
Sunday.

(b) The second is unity. We have seen how St. Paul was led on to grasp
the conception of one church universal manifested in all the local
churches. Its unity is not purely accidental in that individuals have
been forced to act together under pressure of chance circumstances. Nor
is the ideal of unity adopted simply because experience teaches that
"union is strength." Nor is it even based on the philosophical
conception of the incompleteness of the individual life. As Dr Sanday
finely says, "If the church is in something more than mere metaphor the
Body of Christ, if there is circulating through it a continual flow and
return of spiritual forces, derived directly from him, if the Spirit
which animates the Body is one, then the Body itself also must be in
essence one. It has its centre not on earth but in heavenly places,
where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God."[7]

(c) Thirdly, there is no question that the Lord intended the one
fellowship of his saints to be _a visible fellowship_. The idea of an
invisible church has only commended itself in dark hours when men
despaired of unity even as an ideal. The view of Zwingli and Calvin in
the 16th century was not by any means acceptable to other reformers.
Luther distinguished between the Spiritual Church, which he identified
with the Communion of Saints, and the Corporeal Church, the outward
marks of which are Baptism, Sacrament and Gospel. But he regarded them
as different aspects of the same church, and Melanchthon was even more
explicit.[8] As the saint purified in heaven is he who struggled with
his sins on earth, so is the church triumphant one with the church
militant. In Dr Lindsay's words, "it is one of the privileges of faith,
when strengthened by hope and by love, to see the glorious ideal in the
somewhat poor material reality. It was thus that St Paul saw the
universal Church of Christ made visible in the Christian community of
Corinth."[9]

But it is