Spencer Heath Archive

Item 3015

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath while driving from Elkridge, Maryland to Sewanee, Tennessee.

January 1954

 

Original is missing.

THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH

TO establish a religion is impossible. It is only possible to establish a church. Religion is an element that exists in nature.

 

Christ didn’t establish a church, but he practiced a religion. What he did above all else was to inspire people. There never was a church with this function solely in view, of inspiring people.

 

Historically speaking, to establish a church has been to formulate a body of belief or tradition different from others and claiming to be only or absolute or most inclusive, and then to obtain membership to support a formal clergy, their qualifications conforming to accepted doctrine and perhaps ritual practices, with or without any inspirational element or any element of religion — which is the same.

 

Religion was planted in man’s nature when the divine Breath was breathed into his material body. All of those things in nature or human nature that lift men out of themselves, the things men call beauty, constitute the divine element or aspect in the cosmos. In the degree that men are receptive to this inspirational influence, they are redeemed from their merely animal and necessitous condition into creative power and joy. They become co-workers with the Divine by becoming co-creators.

 

Salvation is for the unregenerate man — salvation out of his animal nature into his divine nature. Morality likewise belongs to the unregenerate world. So far as men open their consciousness to the persuasions of beauty they are inspired and thereby divine. They need not even to be admonished as to their belief or their behavior, much less be governed or ruled.

 

The one and only mission of the church is not to save men even from themselves, not to prescribe their beliefs or their behavior, but only and always to inspire them. When the church fulfills this mission it will be the home of freedom for men, for the inspired man is always the free man — the only man who can create a free civilization.

 

When the church becomes the source and home of inspiration, and thereby the institution of freedom among men, it will draw to it all those activities of men that flow from their spontaneous natures and desires and cause them to seek beauty in the heavens and in the earth and in the living things, plant and animal life, including themselves. In this great institution the sciences, born there, will flourish to a never-ending maturity. The aesthetic arts, sponsored and cherished by the church, will flower into such beauty and grandeur as the imagination cannot now conceive.

 

The church is the ultimate home of every expression of the free spirit of man — the arts and sciences and the recreations with which the human body and spirit are refreshed. It will be the crown and summit of civilization, which has its basis in the physical keeping of the peace, and its sustenance and nourishment in the reciprocal relations of economic men practicing the golden rule of service by contract and exchange, each serving all and all in turn serving and thereby loving each.

 

No church embodying the inspiration of the Holy Ghost will ever be set up, but it will grow. As men come more and more under the inspiration of beauty they will be drawn more and more to one another, and so far as they practice the spontaneities of the intellect and of the intuition in the sciences and in the arts, they will become extremely reciprocal one with another. This body of inspired persons, building an ever new and renewing world around themselves, and within themselves, will constitute the living body of the church.³⁰¹⁵