Part 79 (1/2)
'We have none.'
'What makes you a church?'
'Divine Service.'
'What do you mean by that?'
'The sort of thing you have seen to-night.'
'What is your creed?'
'Christ Jesus.'
'But what do you believe about him?'
'What we can. We count any belief in him--the smallest--better than any belief about him--the greatest--or about anything else besides. But we exclude no one.'
'How do you manage without?'
'By admitting no one.'
'I cannot understand you.'
'Well, then: we are an undefined company of people, who have grown into human relations with each other naturally, through one attractive force--love for human beings, regarding them as human beings only in virtue of the divine in them.'
'But you must have some rules,' I insisted.
'None whatever. They would cause us only trouble. We have nothing to take us from our work. Those that are most in earnest, draw most together; those that are on the outskirts have only to do nothing, and they are free of us. But we do sometimes ask people to help us--not with money.'
'But who are the we?'
'Why you, if you will do anything, and I and Miss St. John and twenty others--and a great many more I don't know, for every one is a centre to others. It is our work that binds us together.'
'Then when that stops you drop to pieces.'
'Yes, thank G.o.d. We shall then die. There will be no corporate body--which means a bodied body, or an unsouled body, left behind to simulate life, and corrupt, and work no end of disease. We go to ashes at once, and leave no corpse for a ghoul to inhabit and make a vampire of. When our spirit is dead, our body is vanished.'
'Then you won't last long.'
'Then we oughtn't to last long.'
'But the work of the world could not go on so.'
'We are not the life of the world. G.o.d is. And when we fail, he can and will send out more and better labourers into his harvest-field. It is a divine accident by which we are thus a.s.sociated.'
'But surely the church must be otherwise const.i.tuted.'
'My dear sir, you forget: I said we were a church, not the church.'