society[5]. Whatever needs to be said afterwards
about the special functions of special officers, this is the first
thing to be said and recognized; and it gives us a profound sense of
the distance we have fallen from our ideal. The laity, it is generally
understood among us, are to come to church and perhaps to communion,
are to accept the ministries of religion at marriages and funerals, and
are to subscribe a little money to religious objects; but they may
leave it to the clergy, as a matter of course, to carry on {113} the
business of religion--that is, worship and doctrine, for discipline has
been dropped out--and confine themselves to a certain amount of
irresponsible criticism of the sermons of the clergy and their
proceedings generally.

[Sidenote: _The catholic church_]

For this state of things--this very false sacerdotalism--the
responsibility is generally laid at the door of 'clerical arrogance.'
It is not necessary to consider how large a factor in the result
clerical arrogance has really been, for certainly what alone has given
the clergy the opportunity to put themselves in false isolation, and
what has been an immensely more powerful factor in the general result,
has been the spiritual apathy of the mass of church members, an apathy
which began as soon as the Christian profession began to cost men
little or nothing.

Are we to set to work to revive St. Paul's ideal of the life of a
Church? If so, what we need is not more Christians, but better
Christians. We want to make the moral meaning of church membership
understood and its conditions appreciated. We want to make men
understand that it costs something to be a Christian; that to be a
Christian, that is a Churchman, is to be an intelligent participator in
a corporate life consecrated to God, and to concern {114} oneself
therefore, as a matter of course, in all that touches the corporate
life--its external as well as its spiritual conditions. For the houses
people live in, their wages, their social and commercial relations to
one another, their amusements, the education they receive, the
literature they read, these, no less truly than religious forces
strictly so called, affect intimately the health and well-being of any
society of men. We Christians are fellow-citizens together in the
commonwealth that is consecrated to God, a commonwealth of mortal men
with bodies as well as souls.

(2) But St. Paul also describes the Church as the 'house