It is our work that binds us together.'
'Then when that stops you drop to pieces.'
'Yes, thank God. We shall then die. There will be no corporate
body--which means a bodied body, or an unsouled body, left behind to
simulate life, and corrupt, and work no end of disease. We go to
ashes at once, and leave no corpse for a ghoul to inhabit and make a
vampire of. When our spirit is dead, our body is vanished.'
'Then you won't last long.'
'Then we oughtn't to last long.'
'But the work of the world could not go on so.'
'We are not the life of the world. God is. And when we fail, he
can and will send out more and better labourers into his
harvest-field. It is a divine accident by which we are thus
associated.'
'But surely the church must be otherwise constituted.'
'My dear sir, you forget: I said we were a church, not the church.'
'Do you belong to the Church of England?'
'Yes, some of us. Why should we not? In as much as she has
faithfully preserved the holy records and traditions, our
obligations to her are infinite. And to leave her would be to
quarrel, and start a thousand vermiculate questions, as Lord Bacon
calls them, for which life is too serious in my eyes. I have no
time for that.'
'Then you count the Church of England the Church?' 'Of England, yes;
of the universe, no: that is constituted just like ours, with the
living working Lord for the heart of it.'
'Will you take me for a member?'
'No.
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