First, that which concerns the character and usefulness of the group-organization or society: the Church.

Secondly, that which relates to its peculiar practices: the Cult.

We must enquire under each head what are their necessary characters, their essential gifts to the soul, and what their dangers and limitations.
First, then, the Church.

What does a Church really do for the God-desiring individual; the soul that wants to live a full, complete and real life, which has "felt in its solitude" the presence and compulsion of Eternal Reality under one or other of the forms of religious experience?
I think we can say that the Church or institution gives to its loyal members:-- (1) Group-consciousness.
(2) Religious union, not only with its contemporaries but with the race, that is with history.

This we may regard as an extension into the past--and so an enrichment--of that group-consciousness.
(3) Discipline; and with discipline a sort of spiritual grit, which carries our fluctuating souls past and over the inevitably recurring periods of slackness, and corrects subjectivism.
(4) It gives Culture, handing on the discoveries of the saints.
In so far as the free-lance gets any of these four things, he gets them ultimately, though indirectly, from some institutional source.
On the other hand the institution, since it represents the element of stability in life, does not give, and must not be expected to give, direct spiritual experience; or any onward push towards novelty, freshness of discovery and interpretation in the spiritual sphere.