said,
"the church is primarily a witness--the strength of its authority lies
in the many sides from which the witness comes." It witnesses to the
Divine Life of Christ as a power of the present and of the future as of
the past, ministered in the Word and sacraments.

(e) The church is a sacerdotal society. St Paul delighted to represent
it as the "ideal Israel," and St John echoes the thought in the words of
praise (Rev. i. 5, 6), "Unto him that hath loved us ... and made us to
be a kingdom, and priests unto his God and Father." This idea of the
priesthood of the whole church has three elements--the divine element,
the human element and self-sacrifice. The promise that Christians should
be temples of the living God has been fulfilled. As Dr Milligan has said
very well, "It is not only in things to which we commonly confine the
word miracle that the Divine appears. It may appear not less in the
whole tone and spirit of the Church's life, in the varied Christian
virtues of her members, in the general character of their Christian
work, and in the grace received by them in the Christian sacraments.
When that life is exhibited, as it ought to be, in its distinctively
heavenly character, it bears witness to the presence of a power in
Christian men which no mere recollection of a past example, however
heroic or beautiful, can supply. The difficulties of exhibiting and
maintaining it are probably far greater now than they were in the
apostolic age; and as nothing but a present divine support can enable us
to overcome these, so, when they are overcome, a testimony is given to
the fact that God is with us."[10]

But this life is to be a human life still, to be in touch with all that
is noble and of good report in art and literature, keenly interested in
all the discoveries of science, active in all movements of social
progress. It cannot, however, be denied that to live such a life, divine
in its powers and human in its sympathies, demands daily and hourly
self-sacrifice. As the author of the _Imitation of Christ_ put it long
ago, "There is no living in love without pain." The thought of
self-sacrifice has been emphasized from the earliest times in the
liturgies. By a true instinct the early Christian writers called widows
and orphans the altar of God on which the sacrifices of almsgiving are
offered up.[11] Such works of charity, however, represent only one of
the channels by which self-sacrifice is ministered, to which all pr