On Some Points in the Religious Office of the Universities

that the familiar image which St Paul here uses is far more significant to us than it was to his first readers. The necessary action of Christianity during eighteen centuries has enabled us to see more clearly than they could the moral and spiritual con- nexity of the different elements of life. The faithful study of the external world has defined within certain limits the physical laws by which man is bound to his fellow-man and made de- pendent on the circumstances in which he is placed. A large experience of social life has revealed, at least in general outline, the variations in form under which the same spiritual powers are manifested at different epochs, and shewn that these also are subject to their proper laws. For us the individual is no longer an isolated unit, but a complicated result of an enormous past, inspired at the same time with a personal will, which makes him a source of influence for an immeasurable future. For us the State is no longer centralized in one despotic power, but broken up under manifold governments which express, or tend to express, the characters and aspirations of different nationalities. For us the Church is no longer contemplated under the one formal type of the Old Covenant, but as a divine society, growing with the growing ages, and revealed at each crisis of history with the power needed to control its issue. This being so, it is impossible that we should not find a deep meaning in the Apostle's words hid... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.