re beautiful and wonderful
because of Him whose shadow they are.

You are a Christian? Then do not be afraid to enter any Christian church
with prayerful respect. All the Churches have sworn allegiance to the
same Sovereign. How can you respect a cottage, in which once abided His
Majesty King Alfred, or Charles, while you would not go into a building
dedicated to His Majesty the Invisible King of kings?

The real value of any Christian community is not to be found in its own
prosperity but in its care for the prosperity of other Christian
communities. So, for example, the value of the Protestants is to be
found in their loving care for the Roman Catholics, and vice versa.

Taking the above standard, we find that all the Christian communities
are almost quite valueless as to the spirit, i.e. as to their unusual
loving care. Their actual value is more physical than spiritual, being
as they are limited to the care for themselves. Exceptions are as
refreshing as an oasis in the desert.

Church and State are like fire and water. How to connect them? For if
connected, fire always dies down under water.

There are three ages in the history of the Church: the Golden Age, when
the Church was opposed to political governments; the Iron Age, when she
was politically directing Europe's kingdoms; and the Stone Age, when she
has been subdued to the service of political governments. What a
humiliation for the present generation to live in the Stone Age of
Christianity!

Trying to unite Church and State we are trying to unite what God
separated from the beginning of our era.

To separate the Church from the State does not mean, as many think, to
separate soul from body; it means to separate two quite opposed spirits
unakin and hostile to each other, like Cross and Capitol.

The worm of comfort and human inertia has reconciled Christianity with
secular, pagan governments, and so paralysed the most divine movement in
human history. Go to the bottom of all those clever advocacies for unity
of Church and State, and you will meet, as their primus motor, the worm
of comfort and human inertia.

All Churches and Christian institutions of the present time, however
wonderful they may be, are only a dim prophecy of the coming Christian
worship in truth and spirit. Through them we look now to the future as
through a glass.

Christianity is neither monarchical nor republican. It does not care
about institutions but about the spirit livin