ng the shortest in the Volume. We here
translate it entire:

'By Church-Clothes, it need not be premised that I mean infinitely
more than Cassocks and Surplices; and do not at all mean the mere
haberdasher Sunday Clothes that men go to Church in. Far from it!
Church-Clothes are, in our vocabulary, the Forms, the _Vestures_,
under which men have at various periods embodied and represented for
themselves the Religious Principle; that is to say, invested The
Divine Idea of the World with a sensible and practically active Body,
so that it might dwell among them as a living and life-giving WORD.

'These are unspeakably the most important of all the vestures and
garnitures of Human Existence. They are first spun and woven, I may
say, by that wonder of wonders, SOCIETY; for it is still only when
"two or three are gathered together," that Religion, spiritually
existent, and indeed indestructible, however latent, in each, first
outwardly manifests itself (as with "cloven tongues of fire"), and
seeks to be embodied in a visible Communion and Church Militant.
Mystical, more than magical, is that Communing of Soul with Soul, both
looking heavenward: here properly Soul first speaks with Soul; for
only in looking heavenward, take it in what sense you may, not in
looking earthward, does what we can call Union, mutual Love, Society,
begin to be possible. How true is that of Novalis: "It is certain my
Belief gains quite _infinitely_ the moment I can convince another mind
thereof"! Gaze thou in the face of thy Brother, in those eyes where
plays the lambent fire of Kindness, or in those where rages the lurid
conflagration of Anger; feel how thy own so quiet Soul is straightway
involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate on
each other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame (of embracing
Love, or of deadly-grappling Hate); and then say what miraculous
virtue goes out of man into man. But if so, through all the
thick-plied hulls of our Earthly Life; how much more when it is of the
Divine Life we speak, and inmost ME is, as it were, brought into
contact with inmost ME!

'Thus was it that I said, the Church-Clothes are first spun and woven
by Society; outward Religion originates by Society, Society becomes
possible by Religion. Nay, perhaps, every conceivable Society, past
and present, may well be figured as properly and wholly a Church, in
one or other of these three predicaments: an audibly preaching and
prop