'
'Do you lay claim to no epithet of any sort?'
'We are a church, if you like. There!'
'Who is your clergyman?'
'Nobody.'
'Where do you meet?'
'Nowhere.'
'What are your rules, then?'
'We have none.'
'What makes you a church?'
'Divine Service.'
'What do you mean by that?'
'The sort of thing you have seen to-night.'
'What is your creed?'
'Christ Jesus.'
'But what do you believe about him?'
'What we can. We count any belief in him--the smallest--better than
any belief about him--the greatest--or about anything else besides.
But we exclude no one.'
'How do you manage without?'
'By admitting no one.'
'I cannot understand you.'
'Well, then: we are an undefined company of people, who have grown
into human relations with each other naturally, through one
attractive force--love for human beings, regarding them as human
beings only in virtue of the divine in them.'
'But you must have some rules,' I insisted.
'None whatever. They would cause us only trouble. We have nothing
to take us from our work. Those that are most in earnest, draw most
together; those that are on the outskirts have only to do nothing,
and they are free of us. But we do sometimes ask people to help
us--not with money.'
'But who are the we?'
'Why you, if you will do anything, and I and Miss St. John and
twenty others--and a great many more I don't know, for every one is
a centre to others.
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