ot seek admission into 'the body,' or
disparages it even while it accepts it, does not even present itself to
St. Paul's mind. A faith which is content to remain outside Christ is
no faith at all, and the act of being 'baptized into Christ' is an act
by which 'in one spirit we are baptized into one body.' Again, the
conception impressed upon the institution of the Eucharist is that
Christ's atoning sacrifice is the basis of a new covenant with a
society which is to share His life[36].

Elsewhere St. Paul expresses this by saying that what Christ bought for
Himself was a Church, a new Israel[37]. What His sacrifice purchased
was a new _community_. There is the less necessity to insist upon this
truth because it is now being very generally perceived. The most
powerful influence in recent German Protestant theology is that of
Albrecht Ritschl, and through him the truth has come back, through
unexpected channels, that the object {35} of the sacrificial death of
Christ, and therefore of the divine justification, is not the
individual but the Church[38]; or, if we may venture to modify the
phrase, the object of divine justification is the individual only as
becoming and remaining (so far as His will is concerned) a member of
the Church. In fact, 'justification' may be rendered, without any
false idea being attached to it, 'acceptance for membership in the
sacred people, the Israel of God.' And where any one has become a
member of the Church without even the rudimentary faith which can
render him acceptable in God's sight, there the awakening of such faith
is the condition of profitable or 'saving' membership.

From this point of view it is not difficult to see the relation of our
epistle, broadly, to Protestantism and Catholicism. Protestantism was
a reaction against one-sided ecclesiasticism. The Church is the
household of God, the home of His people. She guides and disciplines
their souls. She feeds them with the bread of life. But her
representatives may suffer her to lose the spiritual characteristics of
the new covenant {36} and fall back upon those of the old. She may
come to be characterized by a mere authoritativeness. The spirit of
'the law of ordinances' may come to prevail again. The sacraments may
be treated as charms; or, in other words, all moral and spiritual
requirement may be summed up in mere obedience, or in doing this and
that. So, in fact, it happened to a great extent in the popular
med