power to regard himself as the servant of all: you have to accept that it is beyond the capacity of the majority to do so, yet they may still wield power with considerable integrity; so it is quite unrealistic to ask of a friend more than he is capable of giving. The number of people whom you should invite to enter a world without sin is minute, because most find the pressure to conform to the world almost overwhelming. When Christ invited all his friends to have an indwelling, or communion, with himself, presumably he knew what he was doing; but I would no more contemplate extending such an invitation to all my friends, than I would fly to the moon. The number you invite is minute.
Some would say, “You should not invite anybody, it is crazy expecting anybody to be without sin”. If you take that advice, any sense of communion you may feel you have with Jesus, in no time becomes just that, a feeling: a day-dream. You no longer have any intention of putting this communion in which you formerly believed into practice; and soon you are simply sponging on someone's love and confidence. Make no mistake about it, if he is alive, as many people say he is, he demands perfection of you as the price of his friendship; he said so in the Sermon on the Mount; and if you wish to express your appreciation of his gracious intimacy by reciprocating with others, you have to demand absence of sin from them. Sensitivity ensures that the demand need not be expressed, but it must be made none the less. Opting out is an equally dangerous alternative to practising consciousness synthesis. Nobody likes fair-weather friends, and it is best not to be one.
What future then for the work-a-day world, if it is quite unrealistic to expect the Church to be a communion of saints, this side of the Day of Judgment? It will continue very much as at present, with sin, crime, and war as endemic features of it. There is no peace dividend in the long term. The Soviet Communist State may have been displaced by another form of…