LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
CHURCH COMPREHENSION.
MO THE gDITOE OF THE " SPECTATOR.") SIR,—Most certainly I would have all laymen " eschew every combination" under the name of " Church" which is instrumental in imposing on their teachers dogmas and declarations which they themselves repudiate in their hearts. I do not know that under these conditions laymen would be compelled to stand so utterly alone. I am quite sure that they need not, under any conditions, add to their perplexities that saddest and most hopeless of all enterprises, founding " each one his own Church." With us, I think, ministers and people combine mainly because they are of one mind, which they believe is not wholly their own mind. But if under higher conditions of spiritual life much separation and even isolation should be for a time inevitable, I can conceive that a deeper and purer unity would grow out of such a state of things than could be realized by the widest comprehension which has been or which can be proposed.
"One flock" (not "one fold," as we mistranslate it), "and one shepherd," Christ saw in the far distance. I firmly believe that it is in the direction which I have ventured to indicate, and in that alone, that the kind of unity of which the New Testament speaks
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