nted.
These spiritual Reformers, however, were untouched by it, because they
began from the interior life, with its dramatic movements, as their
basal fact, and man as they knew him was free.

This spiritual movement involved, as a natural development, an entire
shift from the historical idea of the Church as an authoritative and
supernatural instrument of salvation, to a Church whose authority was
entirely vital, {l} ethical, spiritual, dynamic. The Church of these
spiritual Reformers was a Fellowship, a Society, a Family, rather than
a mysterious and supernatural entity. They felt once again, as
powerfully perhaps as it was possible in their centuries to feel it,
the immense significance of the Pauline conception of the Church as the
continued embodiment and revelation of Christ, the communion of saints
past and present who live or have lived by the Spirit. Through this
spiritual group, part of whom are visible and part invisible, they held
that the divine revelation is continued and the eternal Word of God is
being uttered to the race. "The true religion of Christ," as one of
these spiritual teachers well puts it, "is written in the soul and
spirit of man by the Spirit of God; and the believer is the only book
in which God now writes His New Testament."[31] This Church of the
Spirit is always being built. Its power is proportional to the
spiritual vitality of the membership, to the measure of apprehension of
divine resources, to the depth of insight and grasp of truth, to the
prevalence of love and brotherhood, to the character of service, which
the members exhibit. It possesses no other kind of power or authority
than the power and authority of personal lives formed into a community
by living correspondence with God, and acting as human channels and
organs of His Life and Spirit. Such a Church can meet new formulations
of science and history and social ideals with no authoritative and
conclusive word of God which automatically settles the issue. Its only
weapons are truth and light, and these have to be continually
re-discovered and re-fashioned to fit the facts which the age has found
and verified. Its mission is _prophetic_. It does not dogmatically
decide what facts must be believed, but it sees and announces the
spiritual significance of the facts that are discovered and verified.
It was, thus, in their thought a growing, changing, ever-adjusting
body--the living body of Christ in the world. To the P