stablish sacramental ceremonies. The disposition
to form cliques and exclude and conspire against unlike people is all
too strong in humanity, to permit of its formal encouragement. Even such
organisation as is implied by a creed is to be avoided, for all living
faith coagulates as you phrase it. In this book I have not given so
much as a definite name to the faith of the true God. Organisation for
worship and collective exaltation also, it may be urged, is of little
manifest good. You cannot appoint beforehand a time and place for God to
irradiate your soul.

All these are very valid objections to the church-forming disposition.

4. ORGANISATIONS UNDER GOD

Yet still this leaves many dissatisfied. They want to shout out about
God. They want to share this great thing with all mankind.

Why should they not shout and share?

Let them express all that they desire to express in their own fashion
by themselves or grouped with their friends as they will. Let them shout
chorally if they are so disposed. Let them work in a gang if so they
can work the better. But let them guard themselves against the idea
that they can have God particularly or exclusively with them in any such
undertaking. Or that so they can express God rather than themselves.

That I think states the attitude of the modern spirit towards the idea
of a church. Mankind passes for ever out of the idolatry of altars,
away from the obscene rites of circumcision and symbolical cannibalism,
beyond the sway of the ceremonial priest. But if the modern spirit holds
that religion cannot be organised or any intermediary thrust between God
and man, that does not preclude infinite possibilities of organisation
and collective action UNDER God and within the compass of religion.
There is no reason why religious men should not band themselves the
better to attain specific ends. To borrow a term from British politics,
there is no objection to AD HOC organisations. The objection lies not
against subsidiary organisations for service but against organisations
that may claim to be comprehensive.

For example there is no reason why one should not--and in many cases
there are good reasons why one should--organise or join associations
for the criticism of religious ideas, an employment that may pass very
readily into propaganda.

Many people feel the need of prayer to resist the evil in themselves and
to keep them in mind of divine emotion. And many want not merely pray