Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: gests supernatural effects. Nothing will be assumed here about the Church and the ministry. The conclusions shall be drawn strictly from the evidence. But belief in the Incarnation opens our eyes to give due weight to the evidence. Now on the basis of these assumptions a P x iuquiry. question arises, which must be determined before the proper subject of the present inquiry can be approached. Did Christ found a Church in the sense Did chrit of a visible society ?J That He should have done so is intelligible enough. As it has recently been said,2 it is only by becoming embodied in the undoubting convictions of a society, by being, as it were, assimilated with its mind and motives?that is to say, with living human minds and wills?and informing all its actions, that ideas have reality, and possess power, and become more than dry and lifeless thoughts. As great moral and social and political ideas are preserved in life and force by being embodied in the common and living convictions of the society which we call the State, so great spiritual ideas, which are the offspring of Christianity, are preserved in life and force by becoming the recognised beliefs and motives of the society which we call the 1 For although it is indisputable that our Lord founded a Church, it is an unproved assumption that that Church is an aggregation of visible or organized societies; and although it is clear that our Lord instituted the rite of Christian baptism, it is an unproved assumption that baptism was at the outset, as it has become since, not merely a sign of discipleship, but also a ceremony of initiation into a divine society (Hatch B. L. pref. sec. cd. p. xii). To the idea that the Church is a visible society, or aggregation of societies, is opposed the idea that it is sy...