# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1857_S292
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

292   From a Country Pastor.

the arrangements and ordinances are made. If the society is not to fall into contradiction with itself, if the organization is to be a rational one, then it must be governed by the kind and nature of the purpose. A working society will make other arrangements than a warlike one or a recreational society, because their purposes are different. A common will and the arrangements of the individuals that serve the attainment of what is willed constitute the fully organized society.

The common will, the bond uniting the individuals, the faith that forms the church, has already been shown. What is the ordering of the individuals within it? What is the purpose of the church? Here a difference appears between it and other associations of men. Men associate themselves according to needs and wishes. The church, on the contrary, is gathered by Another, by God Himself, according to a counsel formed from eternity. Yet those so gathered are not to be a mere collection, possessing a unity and union lying outside itself only in a common space or in the idea of the one gathering them; rather, in it God wills to display the idea of human association as such in the perfection of love and of eternal spiritual unity. Christians do not come together into the church in order to form it; rather God Himself calls them out of the life of sin and out of the kingdom of the devil; they do not unite themselves, but He unites them with Himself and inwardly with one another through His Holy Spirit, in that by means of faith He creates in them the mind which in all wills the same thing. If the church is God's work, then its purpose too is one set by God, but one which — since the church is to be a true society — is at the same time imparted and created into it along with the new will: the glory of God in our eternal salvation. The organization of the church too proceeds from Him Himself, and He has set Christ as her head.

The purpose of the church is not attained in this world; she is destined not for this world but for the world to come. God gathers men that as children of God they may possess the inheritance of the future glorified world. If in this life only we hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable, cries a voice from the foundation of the church; and: My kingdom is not of this world, says her cornerstone. Therefore the organization corresponding to her purpose will also take place only in that life, when she possesses the inheritance appointed for her and the glory of God is displayed in and upon her in perfection for all eternity. Then the unity of all and the divine love toward all will become wholly and perfectly visible, in that the apportionment and endowment of individuals, through the uniformly intimate mutual communication of all — since every hindrance to this communication now existing will then be removed — comes to the good of all, as though it were equally the property of all. As each individual member is then perfect, so also is the whole, which as a whole is then mirrored in each. Then the church, as the divine work of holy association, will, in correspondence with her idea,