First with the tendency to organize it in communities or churches, living under special sanctions and rules.

Next, with the tendency of its greatest, most arresting personalities either to revolt from these organisms or to reform, rekindle them from within.

So that the institutional life of religion persists through or in spite of its own constant tendency to stiffen and lose fervour, and the secessions, protests, or renewals which are occasioned by its greatest sons.

Thus our Lord protested against Jewish formalism; many Catholic mystics, and afterwards the best of the Protestant reformers, against Roman formalism; George Fox against one type of Protestant formalism; the Oxford movement against another.
This constant antagonism of church and prophet, of institutional authority and individual vision, is not only true of Christianity but of all great historical faiths.

In the middle ages Kabir and Nanak, and in our own times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away from and denounce ceremonial Hinduism: again and again the great Sufis have led reforms within Islam.