"If you have eyes, you will presently see the church itself--a looming mystery of many shapes and shadows, leaping sheer from floor to dome. The work of no ordinary builder!... The pillars of it go up like the brawny trunks of heroes: the sweet human flesh of men and women is moulded about its bulwarks, strong, impregnable: the faces of little children laugh out from every corner-stone: the terrible spans and arches of it are the joined hands of comrades; and up in the heights and s.p.a.ces there are inscribed the numberless musings of all the dreamers of the world. It is yet building--building and built upon. Sometimes the work goes forward in deep darkness: sometimes in blinding light: now beneath the burden of unutterable anguish: now to the tune of a great laughter and heroic shoutings like the cry of thunder. Sometimes, in the silence of the night-time, one may hear the tiny hammerings of the comrades at work up in the dome--the comrades that have climbed ahead."
All such ideals, like pillars of fire and cloud, lead the march toward a promised land. They are to the actual Church what the poetry of justice is to the actual courts. But in one case as in the other, such ideals are dreams if, with labor and struggle, through many mistakes, against the disheartenment of man"s frailty and sin, we do not work out an inst.i.tution that shall embody and express man"s spiritual life.
Even now a discerning spirit whose own faith has been nourished at the altar regards the Church with boundless grat.i.tude. She has indeed been to the Gospel what courts are to justice, indispensable and yet burdensome, an inst.i.tution that the ideal cannot live without and yet often cannot easily live with. No one feels her faults so acutely as one who devotedly values the Gospel and longs for its adequate expression on the earth. Yet the Church conserves the race"s spiritual gains, fits out our youth with the treasure of man"s acc.u.mulated faith, is a power house of endless moral energy for good causes in the world, exalts the ideal aims of life amid the crushing pressure of material pursuits, holds out a gospel of hope to men whom all others have forsaken, and to the ends of the earth proclaims the good pews of G.o.d and the Kingdom. No other fellowship offers to men of faith so great an opportunity to make distinctive contribution to the race"s spiritual life. In the presence of the Church"s service and the Church"s need an unaffiliated believer in Jesus Christ is an anomaly.
For enrichment, stability, and expression, faith must have fellowship.
_"Oh magnify Jehovah with me, and let us exalt His name together"_ (Psalm 34:3).