Day 28

 Because this is a big world and a big country the Word of God becomes articulate only through the Body of the Church.  You alone cannot influence your community, and your parish alone influence the country or the Episcopal Church alone influence the world.  We need, therefore, to cultivate a sense of the great Church, if our freedom (as parishes and dioceses) is not to lose its greatness, and we are not to go down in corporate egoisms.  Each Church has the right to live only in virtue of the contribution it makes to the great Church.  When we consider God’s will for our world, how our lives are completed in the fellowship to which we belong, how the work of Christ can only be carried on by the Body and not by an individual; we know that a Christian enriched by the Body, should become a great individual, but he cannot be a Christian and individualistic.  We are engaged in warfare and warfare needs an army.  An army acts corporately under a head and can always put a rabble to rout.  This is the great fellowship to which we will to belong and in which each man takes his part.  There is one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all; and we are joined in the mightiest fellowship of earth by what we share.

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