she forsook the Spirit and
resumed the law her Master had condemned. She no longer insisted on that
which Christ proclaimed as imperative, rebirth. She became, as you say,
a mechanical organization, substituting, as the Jews had done, hard and
fast rules for inspiration. She abandoned the Communion of Saints, sold
her birthright for a mess of pottage, for worldly, temporal power when
she declared that inspiration had ceased with the Apostles, when she
failed to see that inspiration is personal, and comes through rebirth.
For the sake of increasing her membership, of dominating the affairs of
men, she has permitted millions who lived in the law and the flesh, who
persisted in forcing men to live by the conventions and customs Christ
repudiated, and so stultify themselves, to act in Christ's name. The
unpardonable sin against the Spirit is to doubt its workings, to maintain
that society will be ruined if it be substituted for the rules and
regulations supposed to make for the material comforts of the nations,
but which in reality suppress and enslave the weak.

"Nevertheless in spite of the Church, marvellously through the Church the
germ of our Lord's message has come down to us, and the age in which we
live is beginning to realize its purport, to condemn the Church for her
subservient rationalism.

"Let us apply the rule of the Spirit to marriage. If we examine the
ideal we shall see clearly that the marriage-service is but a symbol.
Like baptism, it is a worthless and meaningless rite unless the man and
the woman have been born again into the Spirit, released from the law.
If they are still, as St. Paul would say, in the flesh, let them have,
if they wish, a civil permit to live together, for the Spirit can have
nothing to do with such an union. True to herself, the Church symbolizes
the union of her members, the reborn. She has nothing to do with laws
and conventions which are supposedly for the good of society, nor is any
union accomplished if those whom she supposedly joins are not reborn.
If they are, the Church can neither make it or dissolve it, but merely
confirm and acknowledge the work of the Spirit. And every work of the
Spirit is a sacrament. Not baptism and communion and marriage only, but
every act of life.

"Oh, John," she exclaimed, her eyes lighting, "I can believe that! How
beautiful a thought! I see now what is meant when it is said that man
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proc