^ Dr. Dale was spending a summer holiday at Grasmere, and had walked over to Patterdale to spend the day with Dr. Abbott, the headmaster of the City of London School, an able and prominent Broad Churchman. In the early evening his friend started with him to set him on his way home, still intent on the questions, religious and ecclesiastical, which they had discussed for many hours. " We were walking together from the head of Ullswater up towards the foot of Grisedale tarn, and he asked me, with an expression of astonishment and incredulity, whether I really thought that if the shepherds of Patterdale — a dozen or score of them — determined to constitute themselves a Congregational church, it was possible for such a church to fulfil the purposes for ^ H. Scott Holland, Helps to Faith and Practice, 94.
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which churches exist. To such a question there could be but one answer. Great natural sagacity, high intellectual culture, how- ever admirable, are not essential : 'It is enough if, when they meet, they really meet in Christ's name — but no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost.'" Christ's presence with the shepherds of Patterdale would be a sufficient reply to all who challenged their competency to discharge the functions of church government. Whatever gifts and endowments might be necessary for the development of religious thought and life in their full perfection, the Divine presence was its one and its only essential condition.^
3. Each individual life should he a shrine of the Spirit. — Union with Christ, and a consequent life in the Spirit, are sure to result in the growth of the individual soul and of the collective community. That Divine Spirit dwells in and works through every believing soul, and while it is possible to grieve and to quench It, to resist and even to neutralize Its workings, these are the true sources of all our growth in grace and knowledge. The process of building may be and will be slow. Sometimes lurking enemies will pull down in a night what we have laboured at for many days. Often our hands will be slack and our hearts will droop. We shall often be tempted to think that our progress is so slow that it is doubtful if we have ever been on the foundation at all or have been building at all. But " the Spirit helpeth our infirmities," and the task is not ours alone, but His in us. We have to recognize that effort is inseparable from building, but we have also to remember that growth depends on the free circulation of life, and that if we are, and abide, in Jesus, we cannot but be built " for a habitation of God in the Spirit."
Till man has personal relations with God, it is hard to conceive of his having any corporate relations. It would be a monstrous unreality to conceive of a society which God could make His abode, in no single member of which was the presence of the Spirit of God. A whole cannot be utterly diverse from its parts. The presence of the Spirit of God and of the life of God in the soul of man must be presupposed before we can even approach the subject of the corporate life of the Church, or, in other words, of the building up of the Christian Society as a ^ Life of E. W. Dale, 247.
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habitation of God in the Spirit. There is no doubt there was at one time a great danger of over-individualism among religious people in this land. It was not an uncommon thing to hear people say, " A man's religion lies between himself and his God." Why, half the Bible is straight against that ! Possibly there may be some little danger the other way now.
^ Man is a temple either for God or His opposite. It is for us to choose whom we will have to live within. The secret of power is the recognition of the all-loving, me-loving, God. All- holy, and therefore never resting, cost Him what it may, till we are holy too. Away with the austere man ! Enter and abide, thou striving Spirit of Love ! It is a wonderful thing, that consciousness of the Indwelling Jesus. I only lately became positively conscious of this. Hoio, I do not know, of course ; but it was so, and He abides. When over us and in us there is One greater and holier, and more filled with love for us than our furthest thought, and we know it and walk in the light of it, there is power and sweet influence.^
^ In the days of Trajan there lived a Saint of God named Ignatius, who sealed his testimony with his blood. Ignatius was commonly known as Theophoros — or the Bearer of God. I imagine that there was such a pre-eminent holiness, such a supernatural sanctity in his character that he seemed to be a kind of incarna- tion of the Divine life. The title given to Ignatius is one to which every Christian who is faithful to his calling may in some degree humbly lay claim. He is a Theophoros, a God-bearer. Christ dwells in him and he dwells in Christ. Christ is " in him the hope of glory." ^