Christianity claims to be at once a life, a truth, and a worship; and, on all these accounts, it needs must find expression in a church. For, in the first place, the life of an individual remains dwarfed and stunted as long as it is lived in isolation; it is in its origin the outcome of other lives; it is at every moment of its existence dependent upon others; it reaches perfection only when it arrives at a conscious sense of its own deficiencies and limitations, and, therefore, of its dependence, and through such a sense realizes with thankfulness its true relation to the rest of life around it. Again, the knowledge of truth comes to the individual first through the mediation of others, of his parents and teachers; as he grows, and his own intellect works more freely, yet its results only gain consistency, security, width, when tested by the results of other workers; and directly we wish to propagate these results, they must be embodied in the lives of others, in societies, in organizations. Without these, ideas remain in the air, abstract, intangible, appealing perhaps to the philosophic few, but high above the reach of the many, the simple. ‘All human society is the receptacle, nursery, and dwelling-place of ideas, shaped and limited according to the nature of the society—ideas which live and act on it and in it; which are preserved, passed on, and transmitted from one portion of it to another, from one generation to another; which would be merely abstractions or individual opinions if they were not endowed with the common life which their reception in a society gives them.’