Page:A charge delivered at the ordinary visitation of the archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1843.djvu/49

45 Church felt to be not a name, a paper system, a theory of hierarchical government, but a living, earnest, beneficent reality. The people with whom we have to do are a real and earnest people. The wants and cravings of their intellectual and spiritual natures are also real; they abhor forms without life, and usages without a meaning. Claims of authority, without the warrant of perceptible powers to justify and explain them, merely challenge their rebellion: dogmatic formularies, without an energetic realization in practice, simply provoke their unbelief. Of all things the least likely to win the hearts of such a people as the English is a church without the energies of charity and the cross. It is not by controversies, nor by sermons on disputed claims, but by love and self-denial, that we must expound the meaning of Christ's Gospel and the duty of visible unity. We must be the thing we preach, before they will believe us. And their jealous rejection of all empty pretences and unmeaning formalities is the surest pledge to us that the unfailing key to their hearts is the reality of our own. Besides all this, surely there can be no greater slight, no higher indignity put upon the mystical body of Christ, than to misrepresent it to a people as a theory of church-government, a system of doctrine remote from human nature, or a scheme of forms and practices without living unity, without a supreme idea. Of all things on earth the Church is the most real, and