facts or interpretation of apostolic teaching and example can it be so regarded. It is not a mere success n of adaptations that here appears, as of a plant which, changing with a changing environment, while the law of its life remains absolutely the same, is able to adapt itself to a new habitat. Nor is it a simple genuine growth, such as the lapse of time may be expected to record in any resourceful society, whose later stages must of necessity present a very different appearance from its beginnings -a case of root and blossom, of promise and fulfillment.' Neither is it a mere hardening of aspiration and divine communion into ecclesiasticism—the formation of a gritty shell for the protection of the kernel of truth within. None of these. Not a series of adaptations, but compromise and deterioration; not growth, but excrescence; not self-protection from threatening evils without, but shriveling and decay within. Instead of coöperative brotherhood, a hierarchy; instead of the law of liberty, either paternal or egoistic despotism.

Yet we are told that all this, or at least a great part of it, may be regarded as not only inevitable but reasonable and right. "Try as you may"-there are those who thus speak—“you will never get the oak back into the acorn. Neither coaxing nor shrewd management nor violence will be of any avail. Nature forbids. And so also is the Church-the Church of our own time as compared with the more primitive organization of its earliest years." Shall we not listen sympathetically to such an argument? It is indeed a true parable, and all that seems to be needed is the true interpretation thereof. Suppose, then, that the tree which started from the acorn should prove to be but a scrub oak or a bulky but diseased and disfigured oak, or for some reason unworthy to be called an oak at all. "An enemy hath done this."

The departing Son of God gave assurance to the congregation

"For what every being is in its perfect state, that certainly is the nature of that being. Its own final cause and its end must be the perfection of anything." (Aristotle, "Politics," Bk. I., c. 2.)

of his disciples that they might have the perpetual leadership of the Holy Spirit. "That He may be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth." And now if it be asked how the well-nigh universal Christian congregation could have gone so far astray in anti-Christian forms and ideas, the one sufficient negative answer must be: By not knowing the leadership of that "Holy Spirit of promise." For as it was through Pentecost that the Church of Christ was called into actual existence, so it is only through the perpetual illumination of the Spirit that its purity can be preserved and its heritage of power realized.

The first Christian communities lived and walked in the Spirit. As flawless men and women? Alas, no; and yet predominantly as genuine Christian disciples. But when the doors of the house of God were thrown wide open, and all men were brought by baptism into its membership, and kept there as partakers of its sacraments and subjects of its authority to the end of life, it came to be composed chiefly of those who did not live under the tuition of the Spirit. Therefore, they did not want to think and act for themselves as God's coworkers in the furtherance of his kingdom. They did not choose to put on the whole armor of God and "fight the good fight of faith." They were ready to engage substitutes--as if in this war there could be a substitute.

In the civil community such a spirit is known as a relaxation of that eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty; in the Church it made an opportunity, eagerly embraced by ambition or a bedwarfing paternalism, for the priest, the prelate, and the pope. "The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so."

Let it be remembered also that to follow Christ is a very high ideal. It is easy enough to be religious—the formalist or ritualist in any age has set himself no excessively strenuous task. But to be a Christian is to live by faith, in the spirit of love, and in communion with the Father in heaven. It is to deny the mas

'Jeremiah v. 30, 31.

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tership of self. It is to have the spiritual mind. And what more could life at its highest demand?

An American savage, brought into touch with civilization, declared: "It costs too much to be a white man."

Here was a typical instance. The savage did not want to live like a dog. He would be a man. He must have a wigwam, a fire, some cooking utensils, some rude clothing, some weapons, a patch of maize. But as to the civilized life, that seemed far too high for his endeavors. It was a weariness. Its realization cost too much. in labor of hand and brain. He would be let alone, therefore, in dull satisfaction with his low estate. Similarly men in all social and political conditions would be religious. They would not live wholly for the visible and the sensuous. They would pay some homage to the supreme Being. They would practice certain rites of worship, and indulge the hope, each according to his kind, of a happy immortality. But when the religion of the Spirit is set before them, its cost seems singularly heavy and its attainment too lofty an ideal. Why keep striving after the transcendent and divine? Thus the temptation is very powerful to drop down from even the contemplation of a truly Christian life to the plane of mere religious observances.

Behold the opportunity of the prophet, if he should appear, to` stir the inmost deeps of the spirit and bring the man into conscious contact with the living God. But here is also the opportunity of the priest, who is very likely to appear, standing between God and the people and delivering to them such an external and second-hand religion as may satisfy the unspiritual mind.

In what may be called the historic churches the prelatic and sacerdotal conception of the Christian ministry is still either dominant or strongly influential. And in the East little or nothing has been added to it since the fourth century. Not so, however, in the West. For here prelacy has reached its culmination in papacy, and the claim of the priesthood in authoritative absolution and the unequivocally defined mock miracle of transubstantiation.

In Protestantism, which under its infelicitous negative name represents the truer Catholicism, the original idea has been recovered. The Christian congregation is recognized as possessing within itself, through the grace and headship of Christ, all spiritual and ecclesiastic powers. It is the Church of God-in that local congregation. It may preach and teach, administer sacraments, adopt rules and regulations for its own government, elect and dismiss members. When it does these things through its officers, it is as a matter of order and not of inherent difference in spiritual or ecclesiastic power between the officer and the people. The gift and calling of the minister of the gospel is of the Divine Spirit, and the badge of his office is not lordship, but service. The universal priesthood of believers in the Lord Jesus Christ leaves no standing ground for offering salvation through penance and the mechanical operation of sacraments. The priest, therefore, is worse than unneeded and unknown—as in the New Testament.

III.

SERVICE: THE DEACON-HIS EARLIER OFFICE.

THERE are some closely related fundamental truths which it may not be amiss, before going further, to repeat, even at the risk of irksome iteration, as plainly as possible.

1. A church, in the New Testament sense, is a Christian congregation, whether organized or not. True, in all ordinary circumstances it will express itself ere long in some kind of organization, as a matter of well-being. Duty and love will unitedly constrain it to do so. But it may exist as a church, in the form of a simple congregation, before ever it possesses an officer or a polity of any kind.

2. Any church, however small, has the divine right to do, according to the wisdom given it, what any other church, or any particular number of associated churches, or the churches of the whole world collectively, have the right to do. That is to say, it may expound the Scriptures, preach the gospel, administer baptism and the Lord's Supper, ordain officers, admit and expel members, undertake Christian enterprises, as it may deem most conducive to the advancement of the kingdom of God.

If, for example, a few pagans in some far-off isle of the sea should somehow find a book or hear a sermon by an itinerant evangelist which proved to be the means of their conversion and their instruction in Christian doctrine, they might gather themselves together and do all these things without violating any law of Christ. They not only might but ought to do such things. To deny them this power-till, let us say, they were brought into some sort of tactual or other connection with a historic body of Christians would be unscriptural and unjust.

(3) Any local church may, if it will, decide to do any or all of these things through a self-perpetuating body-such as a Quarterly Conference or through the coöperation and approval of some outside ecclesiastical authority-such as a Presbytery or