The Church, we may be told, is the building with a tower down the next street. But that is not quite what we mean. If we say, “The Middle Street School is playing football,” we are not referring to a red brick structure, but to a number of boys. “The Church” means people—a multitude of men, women and children.

It follows that “the Church” does not only mean the clergy. People sometimes say, “Mrs. Robin-. son’s eldest son has entered the Church,” meaning that he has become a priest, but this is an incorrect expression; the Church chooses its ministers’ from its members. If a number of parsons were present at the performance of a play, a journalist would probably say “the Church was strongly represented”; but the actors and the programme-sellers and scores of people in the pit and gallery’ just as truly represent the Church if they belong to it. The clergy are no more the Church than a pair of hands is a human being. The hands are a’ part of the body; the clergy are a part of the Church.

The Church is a society, like a vast family—“the household of God,” founded by God, with rules and privileges of its own. The pattern prayer of the Church begins “Our Father, which art in heaven,” and no one can say this prayer without in spirit linking hands with his brothers [1/2] and sisters as he kneels. When we were born we became members of an earthly family; so it is by a kind of birth that we join this heavenly family. Our Saviour said: “Except a man be born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Baptism is a second birth by means of which God admits us into the household of the Church.

The Church began with a very small circle—twelve men collected and trained by Jesus Christ; and one of the twelve Apostles was a failure. Obviously then the Church is not likely to be free from imperfections. Some people, if they find that the Church contains bad people as well as good, disbelieve in it altogether. Well, remember that Judas Iscariot was an Apostle.

In the Acts of the Apostles, when “the Lord added to them day by day those that were being saved,” the Bible calls the growing Church “the brethren”; in fact, the language of the Church is full of the family idea. The Bishop is called a “Father in God”; priests are often called “Father” or “Padre” (which is Portuguese for “father”); the-followers of St. Francis in the great revival of religion in the thirteenth century were called Fratres, or Brothers, which became, in our language, Friars; women who join religious orders are called Sisters —all these homely words remind us of the same general idea. In one sense this divine family is older than the days of Christ, it goes back to a common spiritual ancestor in Abraham and so inherits the family treasures of the Old Testament.

But the real Founder of the Christian Church [2/3] is Jesus Christ. When God our Creator was made Man for our salvation, and Mary the Blessed Mother held her Son in her arms, then the family to which we belong sprang into being. Christ who is God the Son, the Son of Man, is the head of the family; we are all of one blood because his precious Blood flows in all of us; the altar is our family table where we are all united to one another because we are all united to him. “For we being many are one bread and one body; for we are all partakers of that one Bread.”

Every corporate body, such as a school or a regiment or a tribe, develops a common spirit called esprit de corps (“the spirit of the body”). In the Church, God himself, the Holy Spirit, takes the place of this national corporate spirit. Jesus Christ sent the Holy Spirit to do this by a definite act at Pentecost, a few days after he returned to heaven; and this is the reason why the Church is called holy. It is more than a mere human institution, and our Lord has promised that the Church shall never die.

Some people may say that it is all very well to talk of this family spirit and fellowship, but it seems to them that it does not exist. Members of the Church do not show much good fellowship to one another. We ought to show far more friendship than we do, but the fact that brothers and sisters are not friends does not alter the truth that they belong to one family. Moreover, the fellowship of the Church goes deeper than the surface things of social intercourse. The more serious evil is the division between different bodies [3/4] of Christians which goes so far that Catholics and non-Catholics will sometimes hate one another more than they dislike non-Christians. Family quarrels are often the most bitter ones.

It is obvious that those who call one God “Father,” whether Romanists, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans or Nonconformists, are still only a small minority of mankind, and that being divided they have far less power to combat the evil that is in the world than they would have if all were one. The course of the history of this great family of God throughout the centuries is like that of a river flowing through a plain. For a thousand years it kept to a single channel, then it divided into two great branches, the Church of the East and the Church of the West. Later on, in the sixteenth century the Western Church to which England belonged split again, and now a number of separate channels contains its flow. None of them by itself has sufficient volume and power to show us what the united Church might be; some seem like backwaters of the parent stream, stagnant and lifeless.

But we hope that some day all these separate branches of the divine Family which can trace back their course to the Fountain Head will reunite, and when that day comes it will be possible for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Meanwhile, we know that our own Church is a true descendant of the body founded by Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit down the ages, giving us the true Sacraments, governed by the same [4/5] regulations, and teaching the same true doctrine which the Church has always held. The division of Christendom is a melancholy fact, for it destroys much of the family spirit, and an even greater evil is the existence of so many thousands of members of the Church who never make any use of their membership at all. They ignore the brotherhood, despise the Sacraments, and many of them are ignorant of the meaning of God the Father’s love.

Now no society can possibly exist without rules and obligations, and the Church has very definite obligations. Members of the Church are under an obligation to pray, to fast, to give, to make use of the Sacraments, to work for God. It is because so few of its members make any effort to keep its rules that the Church is so weak. It is by its least live members that the Church is most often judged. Because we have lost the sense of obligation many have lost all love.

There is another aspect of the Church which is a brighter one. Even if its members on earth dwindled to a very small total, we know that the section of it which we see on earth is only a small part of the Family. We believe in “the Communion of Saints” (a saint is one who has the family likeness strongly developed—one who is made by God to be like Christ).

Death does not separate us from the Church, it admits the faithful Christian into closer relationship to our Father in heaven, and to his true children. Heaven is the “next world” not only in the sense that it comes after this world, but [5/6] because it is next door to us all the time. We share in Christ the fellowship with all the blessed ones beyond the veil of death, and the Church on earth is a training-ground for the triumphant Church in heaven

We can make a little clearer to our minds what the Church is by asking, “What is the Church for?” The answer to this question is that the Church exists for the glory of God. This may not seem at first a very satisfactory answer, but I think you will find it is the only true one. The chief error of a good deal of modern religion is to talk as if God himself existed for the sake of us, and to make him a kind of “universal provider,” and to grumble if he does not see fit to give what we imagine we chiefly require. So people complain of the Church, saying, What good is it to me? What do I get out of it? The Church is a family which puts God first, and is taught first of all to promote his glory, saying “Hallowed be thy Name.” It then prays that God’s kingdom may come, and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. It does not omit to ask for all things necessary for our own souls and bodies, but it does not start by saying “Give us bread.” Like the angels at Bethlehem, it first thinks of giving “glory to God in the Highest,” and knows that when that is done “peace on earth, goodwill towards men” will follow as a certain result. The Church on earth has the same mind as the Church in heaven, and teaches us to come to God as his children, not merely as his beggars. “All is love; and in love, for love, and of love, in the holy Church.” The [6/7] Church is a society created for the giving of God’s love to man, and man’s love to God.

God founded the Church to be as wide as mankind. We do not call it in our Creeds Anglican or Roman, but One Catholic or Universal Church. Its ideal is the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; every man, whether black or white or yellow, is eligible for equal membership in it. Adam is called the son of God, and every son of Adam, or every member of the human race, can be made God’s son in Christ.

We call it Apostolic because it traces back its history to the twelve Apostles of Christ and teaches the same truth as they taught.. The Church ought to mean a great international Society in which all men live as brothers, who serve God’ and love one another. It cannot force men to love God nor to be brotherly, and any attempt to force and bludgeon men into international peace and unity must fail.

But everyone who loves the Church and labours for it brings the day nearer when God can heal the breaches of Christendom.

No one then will need to ask, “What is the Church?” for its splendour will shine like a beacon across the world.