ule for using
the invisible church as a source of insight is this: "So be prepared
to interpret, and sympathetically to comprehend, the causes and the
service of other men, that whoever serves the cause of causes, the
unity of all the loyal, may even thereby tend to help you in your
personal service of your own special cause." To cultivate the
comprehension and the reverence for loyalty, however, and wherever
loyalty may be found, is to prepare yourself for a fitting communion
with the invisible church.

And in such communion I find the crowning source of religious insight.
What I say is wholly consistent then with the recognition of the
preciousness of the visible church to its members. Once more, {293}
however, I point out the fact that the visible church is as precious
as it is because it is indeed devoted to the unity of the spirit, that
is, because it is a part and an organ of the invisible church.

V

I cannot close this extremely imperfect sketch of our crowning source
of insight without applying to our present doctrine of the invisible
church, the eternally true teaching of St. Paul regarding spiritual
gifts.

As Paul's Corinthians, in their little community, faced the problem of
the diversity of the gifts and powers whereby their various members
undertook to serve the common cause--as this diversity of gifts tended
from the outset to doctrinal differences of opinion, as the
differences threatened to confuse loyalty by bringing brethren into
conflict--even so, but with immeasurably vaster complications, the
whole religious world, the invisible community of the loyal, has
always faced, and still faces, a diversity of powers and of forms of
insight, a diversity due to the endlessly various temperaments,
capacities and sorts and conditions of men. The Corinthian church, as
Paul sketched its situation, was a miniature of religious humanity.
All the ways that the loyal follow lead upward to the realm of the
spirit, where reason is at once the overarching heaven and the
all-vitalising devotion which binds {294} every loyal individual to
the master of life. But in our universe the one demands the many. The
infinite becomes incarnate through the finite. The paths that lead the
loyal to the knowledge of the eternal pass for our vision, with
manifold crossings and with perplexing wanderings, through the
wilderness of this present world. The divine life is won through
suffering. And rel