Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/58

 and layman will disappear. The priest looks upon his office as destined to serve perpetually, and upon the layman, therefore, as destined to be perpetually an object of service; but the layman hopes to need service less and less. How very disconcerting it would be for the Church, as it is at present organized, if all the laymen should become, in the truest sense, priests. Even if we grant that the organization conforms at present to a situation, yet we detect no wish on its part that the situation should be changed. In every denomination there seems to be a tendency to widen the gulf between priest and layman, honoring the first without ennobling the second. The very devotion which is the warrant of true religion, bids the layman look up, as to a higher order of being, to the holder of the priestly office. But when a man begins as it were to cherish holiness in another's