Page:The Power of the Spirit.djvu/111



106 profession of belief in the Spirit, because the inspiration of the Church is the highest work of the Spirit, as it is the most difficult of accomplishment. We need not be afraid of becoming too ecclesiastical; our fault is that we are never ecclesiastical enough, but are content to say in our hearts that we believe in our own church, and some cognate organizations, instead of in that universal brotherhood and kingdom which is the mother of us all.

The Holy Ghost is the Spirit of holy individualism, the Spirit of Liberty, moving men to struggle against both secular and ecclesiastical domination, whether it works by persecution or by bribery. The Holy Ghost is also the Spirit of holy fellowship, the Spirit of Charity, which moves men to love one another— and for that end, to get to know one another not only within their own fragments of the broken body of Christ, but among those also which are alien to them. Our modern era has seen the Liberty of the Spirit spreading over the world; and now, after four centuries of struggle, we know ourselves to be at the beginning of a movement towards a new Fellowship of the Spirit. Only on these spiritual bases can an order arise that is in truth such a 'holy order' as the Church has proclaimed and tried for ages to establish throughout the world.

This corporate inspiration of the community that was destined to battle its way through the centuries, seems to have been S. Paul's crowning