rding to the kingdoms of this world; a human organization in which
the administrative functions of government are centralized under some
form of human headship; a unity that is not moral and spiritual, but
official and administrative, as well as legislative and judicial.

[Sidenote: Wrong standard of church-membership]

Coincident with the creation of foreign ideals concerning church
societies was the formation of of a foreign idea of church-membership
and church-relationship. In the beginning, as we have shown, the
church was simply the divine family. Therefore salvation through
Christ was its sole condition of membership. "And the Lord added to
them day by day those that were being saved" (Acts 2:47, R.V.). And as
the local congregation was but the concrete expression of the ideals
of the general body or church, that membership in Christ which made
men members of the general body, made them, by a moral and spiritual
law, members of all the other members of Christ, and therefore fixed
their local relationship: they belonged by divine right with whichever
company of believers they happened to be associated. Nothing more than
simple recognition of what God had done for them and the according
to them of the local rights and privileges that naturally belonged
to them was necessary on the part of a local congregation to make the
actual union complete.

The wrong conception of the constitution of the church necessarily
required another standard of church-membership. When _church_ came
to signify merely a group of congregations consolidated under a
centralized human headship possessing administrative, legislative, and
judicial functions (so organized as to distinguish it from all other
organized groups or congregations), simple membership in Christ was
insufficient to mark the convert with the stamp of denominational
individuality. Salvation itself made no one a member of a church
fashioned according to the kingdoms of this world. Consequently
another standard of membership was necessary, a standard which
required acceptance of and conformity to the self-made rules and
regulations of that foreign society called a church. And when these
earth-born institutions became identified in the public mind with
the real church of Christ and membership in them became confused with
membership in the true church of God, the natural result was that
millions complied, in a formal manner at least, with the conditions of
the counterfeit chu