This is the condition of entrance, and the method is equally simple.
It is to follow Jesus in all our acts and thoughts, to allow no temper
that we do not find in Him, to build our lives upon His ideals of love
and justice, remembering always that He is more than the Truth,--He is
the Way in which men may confidently tread, and the Life which they may
share.
All things in the intellectual and social life of men move, as by a
fixed law, towards simplification. May we not hope that this same
tendency may permeate the universal Church of Christ, dissolving the
accretions of mistaken and conventional piety, combining the vital
elements into a new synthesis, at once simple and convincing,--the new
which is the oldest and the earliest,--that the Church is the organ of
the Divine Love, and that love alone is the Christian equivalent of
religion?
May we not even anticipate that the visible decay of many symbols that
once were authoritative, of many forms of creed that are now barely
tolerated rather than respected, may work towards this issue; that
gradually the test of service will supplant the test of intellectual
belief, and that a new Church will arise founded not on creed at all,
but on a real imitation of the life of Jesus? If this should happen we
need not regret the dissolution of the forms of religious life which is
so evident to-day, for though the older kingdom be shaken, we shall
arrive in God's time at the better kingdom which cannot be shaken.
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