Page:The End of the World.djvu/21

Rh the Church, and the nation may be accurately measured by the purity, devotion, chastity, and holiness of the marriage relation, and by the conception the sexes have of each other.

From the love between the sexes, as from a sweet or bitter fountain, flow by derivation and kinship all other loves, parental, filial, fraternal, neighborly, and social.

The spiritual state of the family is the test of its religion, and of the regenerative value of the doctrines taught to it by the Church as divine truth.

The external or visible Church is an assemblage of individuals and families held together by common bonds of religious faith and usages. It is a Church of God only by virtue of the truth and good, or of the Godlike and Christlike elements it may contain.

A Church may backslide and retrograde like an individual. It may corrupt the faith and deteriorate the standard of life, until it ceases to be the Church of God, and precipitates a judgment upon itself and the world.

No matter what it may profess or claim, no matter what its outward prosperity and power may be, its