your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God
and Father of all."

21. Christians should feel bound to maintain the unity of the Spirit,
since they are all members of one body and partakers of the same
spiritual blessings. They have the same priceless treasures--one God
and Father in heaven, one Lord and Savior, one Word, baptism and
faith; in short, one and the same salvation, a blessing common to all
whereof one has as much as another, and cannot obtain more. What
occasion, then, for divisions or for further seeking?

22. Here Paul teaches what the true Christian Church is and how it
may be identified. There is not more than one Church, or people of
God, one earth. This one Church has one faith, one baptism, one
confession of God the Father and of Jesus Christ. Its members
faithfully hold, and abide by, these common truths. Every one
desiring to be saved and to come to God must be incorporated into
this Church, outside of which no one will be saved.

23. Unity of the Church does not consist in similarity of outward
form of government, likeness of Law, tradition and ecclesiastical
customs, as the Pope and his followers claim. They would exclude from
the Church all not obedient to them in these outward things, though
members of the one faith, one baptism, and so on. The Church is
termed "one holy, catholic or Christian Church," because it
represents one plain, pure Gospel doctrine, and an outward confession
thereof, always and everywhere, regardless of dissimilarity of
physical life, or of outward ordinances, customs and ceremonies.

24. But they are not members of the true Church of Christ who,
instead of preserving unity of doctrine and oneness of Christian
faith, cause divisions and offenses--as Paul says (Rom 16, 17)--by
the human doctrines and self-appointed works for which they contend,
imposing them upon all Christians as necessary. They are perverters
and destroyers of the Church, as we have elsewhere frequently shown.
The consolation of the true doctrine is ours, and we hold it in
opposition to Popedom, which accuses us of having withdrawn from
them, and so condemns us as apostates from the Church. They are,
however, themselves the real apostates, persecuting the truth and
destroying the unity of the Spirit under the name and title of the
Church and of Christ. Therefore, according to the command of God, all
men are under obligation to shun them and withdraw from them.

_Eighteenth Sunday