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Mr. Gladstone bears testimony to the place of form in religion. “The Church,” he says, “presented to me Christianity under an aspect in which I had not yet known it, ... its ministry of symbols, its channels of grace, its unending line of teachers forming from the Head a sublime construction based throughout on historic fact, uplifting the idea of the community in which we live, and of the access which it enjoys through the living way to the presence of the Most High.”

Mr. Gladstone found in the Anglican Church a form of access to the Most High, and through this Church the thoughts of the Most High were worked into his daily life. Others through the Bible, the sacraments, humanity, or through some doctrine of Christ have found like means of access. Forms are essential to religion. Forms, indeed, have often become the whole of religion, so that people who have honoured images or words or names have forgotten goodness and justice—they wash the cup and platter and forget mercy and judgment; they say “Lord, Lord,” and do not the will of the Lord. Forms have often become idols, but the point I urge is that for the majority of mankind forms are necessary to religion. “Tell me thy name,” was the cry of Jacob, when all night he wrestled with an unknown power which condemned his life of selfish duplicity; and every crisis in Israelitish history is marked by the revelation of a new name for the Most High. The Samaritans do not know what they worship; the Jews know what they worship,—was the rebuke of Christ to a wayward and ineffective nation. Even those Athenians to whom God was the Unknown God had to erect an altar to that God.