WORSHIP 77 



its most striking characteristics. All who joined it felt 

 instinctively that they had entered into a real brother- 

 hood, where the need of one was the concern of alL 

 Thus Hatch tells us, that brotherhood stood for a great 

 reality in the primitive Church of the first century. 

 Fostered as it was by bitter persecution, it proved an 

 all-sufficient bond of union, binding its members together 

 as one. The Primitive Church was, indeed, a Christian 

 Fellowship, 



But as the Church gained in political power, it lost 

 in spiritual grace, and the natural consequence was that 

 this sense of brotherhood weakened until, in the days of 

 Constantine, professing Christians had to look for other 

 bonds of union ; and these they found in uniformity 

 of creed and dogma and ritual, and in church organisa- 

 tion, and to these they have clung with a pathetic 

 tenacity from that day to this. 



If you turn to the tenth chapter of John and the 

 sixteenth verse, you may read in the Authorised Version, 

 ** Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold. These 

 also must I bring, and they shall hear My Voice, and 

 there shall be one fold and one shepherd,'' But here 

 we have a mistranslation, which has, fortunately, been 

 corrected in the Revised Version, Christ never said : 

 ** there shall be one fold and one shepherd,'' What He 

 did say was : ** there shall be one flock and one shepherd," 

 A very different thing. But, as Rufus Jones has pointed 

 out, ever since the days of Constantine, the various 

 sections of the Christian Church have set themselves 

 to work to build sheep-folds ; pens, with high walls of 

 creed and dogma, which they have called ** orthodoxy," 

 and a gate which they have called ** the way of salva- 

 tion," But in no case has it been the living way. And 

 although each section of the Church has christened all 

 the animals inside its particular pen ** sheep/* and all 

 the animals outside its particular pen ** goats/* yet any 



