such The Church has its pastors and teachers, its word and sacraments, which are modes by which we come to God. This he calls the visible Church. And, while included in the confession "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church," yet this confession refers not alone to this visible Church, but to all the elect, including the past and the future.

It is a matter of faith, according to Calvin, because man cannot distinguish the true and the false. Yet this visible Church, according to Calvin, is our mother. This visible Church, however, includes also hypocrites and sinners. (Here Calvin becomes catholic.)

According to Ritschl, Calvin seems to suggest that the private individual, with his judgment test of love may distinguish the true from the false disciple, may know "who profess the same Christ with us by their confession of faith and example of life, and participation in the sacraments.'

As Ritschl suggests, this judgment of love can easily become a judgment of lovelessness. Ritschl charges against Calvin that The Church is in itself invisible, and yet that Calvin recognizes signs whereby this invisible Church can be detected.

While Calvin thus gets into questionable opinions, yet Ritschl says that Calvin is following Luther and Melancthon in the words, "Wherever the Word of God is sincerely preached and heard, wherever the sacraments of Christ's institution are seen in administration, there without doubt The Church is to be found, because nowhere is it possible for these to be but that they bring forth fruit and prosper by the blessing of God."

According to this, invisibility does not in the true sense belong to the Church. Yet, according to Ritschl, Calvin does come into decided conflict with himself in speaking of this Church which is made up of true and false Christians,

as the object of faith, for the Church of faith is only the ideal vision of the reality.

Ritschl's conclusion with regard to these views of the Reformers is that they lack discrimination. The Reformers recognize the political church; that is, the need of organization and the moral need that the communion of saints shall be a social community.

But Ritschl says that neither Luther nor Melancthon nor Calvin is conscious that he is here on moral, ethical grounds, and not on dogmatic grounds.

Ritschl says: "The Church is object of faith and of the knowledge based on faith, and as such is the communion of saints which is grounded and bound together by means of the divine factors of the gospel and the sacraments, and has its necessary marks in these, through which also it comes to manifestation.

"The Church is therefore visible and perceptible for the kind of experience which alone is appropriate to her nature, viz.: faith. With this thought of Luther's and Melancthon's, with which also Calvin involuntarily agrees, we decide against the intentional view of Zwingli and Calvin, that The Church is to be defined as in itself an invisible community of those whom God has elected to salvation.

"For this election is accomplished in reality only, according to Calvin, through these factors. And when Zwingli does not bring these factors as necessary into view, in order that he may let the heathen count as elect, and that he may reckon those who pertain to the future as belonging to The Church, so in part he overlooks the historical element in the divine counsel of election, and in part confuses the idea of The Church with the divine idea of the kingdom of God."

NOTES

Darwell Stone has written a valuable book entitled "The Christian Church," London, 1905, in which he presents the catholic concept of the Church. He follows the Augustinian notion that the Kingdom is the Church, and so represents the same school as Moberly, Liddon, and Gore. He combats Newman's conception that " Christianity came into the world as an idea rather than an institution." He constantly assumes the issue, “The Christian system has been embodied in a visible Church." "The history of religion involves a church." His fallacy is in assuming that a church is the Church. He, himself, admits that there are at least three churches. The identity of Church and Kingdom he finds in that baptism is the entrance to both (p. 36). For this statement there is no valid evidence. By baptism is secured public entrance into some manifestation of The Church, but into the Kingdom man comes through a new birth, and these are not necessarily the same.

IV

Henson, H. H., "Apostolic Christianity," London, 1898, says: "The Christian Church was literally the offspring of the synagogue (p. 4). It is a "secession from the synagogue." "The autonomy of the ecclesia was subject to (1) the laws of Christ, (2) the moral law of the Old Testament, (3) Apostolic authority."

"The Apostolic Church was not congregational, nor presbyterial, nor episcopal."

"Paul's teaching precludes the existence of any visible centre of unity."

“On the whole view of the last four centuries non-episcopal Christianity has proved its power to stand the test proposed by our Lord. Its fruits are indisputable" (p. 302).

"The exclusive claims of types of ecclesiastical order constitute perhaps the most obdurate and general of such stumbling blocks" to the unity of the Spirit. "Most of these claims are certainly false, all are probably exaggerated, all may be found ultimately to be baseless" (p. 305).

V

Plitt, Hermann, "Gemeine Gottes," Gotha, 1859, says:

"The

Church is in essence spiritual, eternal, and rests on the union of its members with God and one another in Christ through faith and love (s. 2).

Its "form is conditioned by human conditions of space and time." The Church has its two sides, a visible and an invisible, a physical and a spiritual, but “not that there are two distinct gemeinschaften (communions)."

The inner communion, Plitt prefers to call "Kingdom," which he defines as "the invisible, though real, unity, in which all God's children are at home."

"Each church must confess that it is not the Kingdom, and yet must work that the Kingdom is in it" (s. 16).

"We have recognized a multitude of visible churches as divinely intended (Gottgewollt), inevitable and beneficial, and the duty of Christendom is not found in an artificial and forced unity, but in a spiritual unity of knowledge and love."

Charles Hodge says: ("Church Polity") "If a body of professing Christians is organized in a certain way, it is a church, no matter whether it is as heretical and idolatrous as Rome, or as ignorant and superstitious as the Greeks and Abyssinians."

"The protestant doctrine which makes the profession of the true religion the only essential criterion of the Church is neither arbitrary nor optional. It is necessary and obligatory" (p. 139).

"People do not confer the office, but join in the exercise of a judgment whether a given person is called of God to be a minister."

John Brown ("Apostolic Succession "), says (p. 34): "One universal church organization is hitherto unattained and unattainable. The bishop came through the cessation of charismatic gifts and the cessation of itinerant apostles, prophets and teachers" (pp. 219–221). He says: "The Anglican claim is recent and modern, and is first urged as a counter-claim to presbyterianism" (p. 399).

He quotes Archbishop Tait:-"He could hardly imagine there were two bishops on the bench, or one clergyman in fifty, who would deny the validity of a Presbyterian clergyman solely on account of their wanting the imposition of episcopal hands."

To this, the Church Quarterly Review somewhat angrily replied:

"If the episcopate is unnecessary for valid ordination, the Church of England is guilty of no little tyranny, not to say schism, in her treatment of non-episcopal communities” (Church Review, October, 1885). Dr. Brown's conclusion is:-"The Church is a divine society which is supernatural not because it is ruled by a heaven-ordained priesthood, but because the Spirit of God dwells in every member of the Church commonalty" (p. 444).

J. V. C. Durell says: "The one universal Church is represented

in each place by the local church in that place" ("Historic Church," p. 302).

[This "one universal Church," however, is itself nowhere on earth fully manifested. It is not to be identified with any one church, be it Roman or Greek, or Anglican. Nor with all churches put together. These manifest this one Church, which is perfectly manifest alone to God, and exists as an eternal reality beyond its temporal manifestations.]

As to the relation of the Christian Church to the Church of the preChristian dispensation Richard Field, Dean of Gloucester (of whom Fuller spoke as "The Field the Lord hath blessed"), says: "Though the Church of the Old and New Testament be in essence the same, yet for that the state of the Church of the New Testament is in many respects far more glorious and excellent, the Fathers for the most part appropriate the name Christian to the multitude of believers since the coming of Christ" (See his "Five Books of The Church ").

Goldwin Smith has recently written concerning the Anglican church: "Laud, on the scaffold, declared that he had always lived in the Protestant Church of England.'"

“The king when crowned, has, till Edward VII taken a strong anti-catholic oath, and he is head of the Church."

66

It is surely idle to deny that down to the rise of Tractarianism, sixty years ago, the Church of England and all its members considered themselves Protestant, called themselves Protestant."

"It seems impossible to deny, that legally and historically the national Church of England is Protestant."—The Independent, N. Y., September 2, 1907.

In "Our Churches and Why We Belong to Them," Webb-Peploe says: "The Church of England knows nothing of a sacrificing priesthood" (p. 364).