unity, brotherhood, peace. The actual in the matter of the church is what really exists in respect to its membership, organic form, administration, moral status, spiritual life, activity in doing good, service of God and humanity, at any period of its history. The ideal is the archetype, the model, the promise of what will be when the original purpose of God in the existence of the church is accomplished. And that ideal is ever the same. It is the vision of things yet to come, of the great end towards. which the church should be evermore striving; it is the pattern fashioned by God's own hand, made known in the Gospel of His dear Son, disclosed to the thought of pure and holy souls, after which the church should be evermore moulding itself, and to the distinctive features of which it should be ever conforming its character and life. As that ideal is made actual by the church, the church exemplifies more and more the true meaning of the Christian religion; when the two become identical, when the ideal becomes the actual, then will God's kingdom have come and His will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.

In what respects, we may now inquire, was the primitive Christian church human?

1. In respect to its membership. In its organic capacity, as a company of the disciples of Christ, the church was composed of human beings, in their very nature and degree of development, imperfect, ignorant in many particulars, liable to error, to folly, and to wrong doing. They had indeed noble endowments, grand capabilities, the germs of virtues

and excellences that could grow and blossom into a perfect character into Christlikeness and the moral image of the infinite God. But they must needs pass through long processes of education, discipline, and experience, in order to attain their destined perfectness. Entering as pupils in the school of the great Teacher, a few were apt to learn and make rapid progress in the better life to which they were called; more were dull to appre hend moral and spiritual truth and slow to appropriate it to personal use; while too many were carnally-minded and basely inclined, yielding readily to temptation, and the solicitations of evil passions and evil men, and so either falling away through sheer weakness from their professedly high aims, or wilfully apostatizing from the truth as it was in Jesus, and prostituting their transcendent privileges to ignoble, selfish, reprehensible ends. And as it was with the church at the outset in this regard, so has it been in all ages of Christian history, and so to a great extent it is today.

2. In respect to its organization and constructive form. There is no such thing as a divine method of operation for church or state; no such thing as a God-appointed way of accomplishing contemplated ends, so far as concerns outward instrumentalities and appliances. These are strictly human devices, the products of human ingenuity, skill, wisdom, and therefore more or less faulty and inadequate. It was so in the beginning of the Christian regime, is now, and ever will be. Besides, forms of government and means of accomplishment

vary with the varying conditions, circumstances, and historic eras under which they exist. What may serve at one time an important end will prove utterly insufficient at another. And what is well suited to one class of mind or one stage of moral development will be worth nothing to other minds or at other stages of progress. People outgrow forms and organizations, as they outgrow their garments, and must have new ones. What is adapted to an infant church may be wholly useless to an old, long-established one. Existing needs, surrounding circumstances, and numerous considerations of a practical nature must go far to determine what mode of government, what plans of operation shall be instituted at any given period to further most effectually the great objects for which the Christian church was founded.

Much time and labor have been expended during the Christian ages, not infrequently at much loss of the Christian spirit and to the great detriment of the church itself, in discussing whether the Papal or the Episcopal, the Presbyterian or the Congregational forms of church government were scriptural and obligatory or not - whether or not either one of these was to be adopted and maintained at all hazards and against all opposition. Also, as to the propriety and authority of popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, presbyters, councils, and the like. All of which goes to demonstrate how human, how subject to circumstances, to the tastes, the predilections, the fallible opinions, and often the mere whims and passions of men, the church

has ever been in respect to its organization, constructive form, and method of action, in the different departments of its institutional life.

3. The church is emphatically human, moreover, in respect to its administration-in respect to the. management of its various offices and functions.. As a matter of course those appointed in any period of its history to have charge of its affairs, to serve at its altars, to direct its activities, to execute its purposes in any particular,-its ministers, priests, official servants, of whatsoever order or name, however divinely called, ordained, inspired, or assisted. from the unseen world,' were, nevertheless, men. like their subordinate fellow Christians, clothed with. all the attributes of a distinctive personality and power of self-determination, and therefore imperfect in judgment and liable to greater or less mistake. In the discharge of their respective duties, much was left to their own discretion, practical good. sense, and moral perceptivity. Human themselves, they were in a human world, working with human materials, amid human difficulties, under everchanging human circumstances; subject to more or less error in consideration of their essential personality they were also subject to great difficulties and trials, as they were in danger of being thwarted in their best aims and efforts; and it is no wonder that their administration of church affairs was more or less open to criticism and even to reprobation, or that the church as an institution, as an active working body in the world, as a hierarchy claiming a divine origin on the one hand, and the respect, con-.

fidence, homage, support of right-minded, humane, devout, God-fearing people on the other, should at the same time display its own weakness, imperfection, mutability, capacity for retrogression as well for reformation and progress; in other words, display its own human side in a marked and unmistakable degree.

In these three particulars, to say nothing of less important ones, does the church in all its history. show that, whatever may be the extent of the divine element in its essential nature, character, and distinguishing purpose, it has also a purely human element entering into the very blood and fiber of its being and characterizing every department and manifestation of its intrinsic life. Nor is there anything in this humanism of the church which is to its disparagement or which vititates its claims to the confidence, veneration, and love of mankind; anything derogatory to its assumption of indwelling divinity, of being a God-commissioned instrumentality for the edification, regeneration, and perfecting of the race; anything fatal to its final supremacy in the world, or discouraging to those sincerely endeavoring to actualize its divine ideal within its own membership and throughout the earth. But the contrary rather. For if the church were deemed wholly divine, there could be no ground for hope of its improvement, or for effort to carry it forward to perfection; if it were deemed wholly human, with nothing of the divinity in it, the case would be equally hopeless; for it would lack the essential life-principle, the germ from which