326 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



Let us consider what sort of Christian society it is 

 possible to form, on the hypothesis that every member 

 has just that knowledge which is directly given in his 

 own personal religious experiences. Every society is 

 bound together by a common aim and common principles. 

 This society must be bound together by its common 

 Christianity. But the Christianity of each man presents 

 itself to him, on the hypothesis, only in the form of 

 strictly individual religious experiences and frames of 

 thought, so that the only bond of Christian union possible 

 is similarity of experience in details, identity of individual 

 frames and habits of mind. The society which arises 

 when men come together on this ground is a society of 

 the like-minded, all busy with their common religious 

 experiences. The principle of union goes no farther 

 than the similarity of experience. Two men, whose 

 Christian lives have run different courses, are, in pro 

 portion to the extent of this difference, debarred from 

 Christian fellowship. We all recognise the description of 

 such a society. It is not the Church, but the conventicle, 

 the ecclesiola in ecclesia, the fellowship of separatists and 

 sectarians. It is a society which can never be catholic, 

 never a spiritual might, never permanent ; never catholic, 

 for its breadth of comprehension is limited by purely 

 individual accidents of Christian experience ; never a 

 spiritual might, for the attraction of homogeneous in 

 dividuals means the repulsion of the heterogeneous ; 

 never permanent, for if it does not split up in the first 

 generation by the development of different types in the 

 farther experience of those who started from a common 

 point, it must at least fall to pieces in the next generation, 

 from the certainty that the children will not be like the 

 parents. 



It appears, then, that the assertion that mere personal, 

 inarticulate knowledge serves all the necessities of 

 Christian growth, is necessarily bound up with another 

 assertion, namely, that the whole growth of Christianity 



