That which we are now concerned to discover is the necessity underlying this conflict: the extent in which the institution on one hand serves the spiritual life, and on the other cramps or opposes its free development.

It is a truism that all such institutions tend to degenerate, to become mechanical, and to tyrannize.

Are they then, in spite of these adverse characters, to be looked on as essential, inevitable, or merely desirable expressions of the spiritual life in man; or can this spiritual life flourish in pure freedom?
This question, often put in the crucial form, "Did Jesus Christ intend to form a Church ?" is well worth asking.

Indeed, it is of great pressing importance to those who now have the spiritual reconstruction of society at heart.

It means, in practice: can men best be saved, regenerated, one by one, by their direct responses to the action of the Spirit; or, is the life of the Spirit best found and actualized through submission to tradition and contacts with other men--that is, in a group or church?
And if in a group or church, what should the character of this society be?
But we shall make no real movement towards solving this problem, unless we abandon both the standpoint of authority, and that of naive religious individualism; and consent to look at it as a part of the general problem of human society, in the light of history, of psychology, and of ethics.
I think we may say without exaggeration that the general modern judgment--not, of course, the clerical or orthodox judgment--is adverse to institutionalism; at least as it now exists.