tly tread, and the Life which they may
share.

All things in the intellectual and social life of men move, as by a
fixed law, towards simplification. May we not hope that this same
tendency may permeate the universal Church of Christ, dissolving the
accretions of mistaken and conventional piety, combining the vital
elements into a new synthesis, at once simple and convincing,--the new
which is the oldest and the earliest,--that the Church is the organ of
the Divine Love, and that love alone is the Christian equivalent of
religion?

May we not even anticipate that the visible decay of many symbols that
once were authoritative, of many forms of creed that are now barely
tolerated rather than respected, may work towards this issue; that
gradually the test of service will supplant the test of intellectual
belief, and that a new Church will arise founded not on creed at all,
but on a real imitation of the life of Jesus? If this should happen we
need not regret the dissolution of the forms of religious life which is
so evident to-day, for though the older kingdom be shaken, we shall
arrive in God's time at the better kingdom which cannot be shaken.

When the Church does manifestly become the organ of the Divine Love,
visibly creating a type of loving and lovable men and women found
nowhere else, whose lives are as lamps borne before the feet of the
weary and the lost, then the world, now hostile or indifferent to the
Church, will love the Church even as by instinct it loves the Christ.
Such lives have been lived, and they are, even to those who have the
least instinct for religion, the most sacred memories of history, and
the most inspiring. Such lives may still be lived by all who love the
Lord Christ Jesus in sincerity.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Empire of Love, by W. J. Dawson

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