eets these requirements. Nor yet does the {276} number of persons in
its membership form any essential criterion. Wherever two or three are
gathered together, and are living as they can in the Spirit that the
divine will (which wills the loyal union of all mankind) requires of
them--there, indeed, the work of the Spirit is done; and the
organisation in question is a religious brotherhood. It needs no human
sanction to make it such. Though it dwell on a desert island, and
though all its members soon die and are forgotten of men, its loyal
deeds are irrevocable facts of the eternal world; and the universal
life knows that here at least the divine will is expressed in human
acts.

But so far as such communities both exist and are distinctly
recognisable as religious in their life and intent, they form a source
of religious insight to all who come under their influence. Such a
source acts as a means whereby any or all of our previous sources may
be opened to us, may become effective, may bear fruit. _Hence, in this
new source, we find the crowning source of religious insight._

This last statement is one which is accepted by many who would
nevertheless limit its application to certain religious communities,
and to those only; or who, in some cases, would limit its application
to some one religious community. There are, for instance, many who
say, for various special reasons, that the crowning source of
religious insight is the visible church. By this term those who use it
in any of its traditional senses, mean one religious {277} institution
only, or at most only a certain group of religious organisations. The
visible church is a religious organisation, or group of such
organisations, which is characterised by certain traditions, by a
certain real or supposed history, by a more or less well-defined
creed, and by further assertions concerning the divine revelation to
which it owes its origin and authority. With the doctrinal questions
involved in the understanding of this definition, these lectures, as
you now well know, have no direct concern. It is enough for our
present purpose to say that the visible church thus defined is indeed,
and explicitly, and in our present sense, a religious organisation. In
all those historical forms which here concern us, the visible church
has undertaken to show men the way to salvation. It has carried out
its task by uniting its members in a spiritual brotherhood. It has in
ideal extended