Whom it could not be at all.  It is but another way of saying what he has expressed elsewhere—­“that there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we may be saved.”  Let us not lose ourselves in vague generalities.  Separate from Christ, there is no salvation; there can be no Christianity.  Let us understand what we mean by this.  Let us clearly define and enter into the meaning of the words we use.  When we say that our Lord Jesus Christ is He “of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,” we mean that the very being of the Church depends on Christ—­that it could not be without Him.  Now, the Church of Christ depends upon these three things—­first, the recognition of a common Father; secondly, of a common Humanity; and thirdly, of a common Sacrifice.

1.  First, the recognition of a common Father.  That is the sacred truth proclaimed by the Epiphany.  God revealed in Christ—­not the Father of the Jew only, but also of the Gentile.  The Father of a “whole family.”  Not the partial Father, loving one alone—­the elder—­but the younger son besides:  the outcast prodigal who had spent his living with harlots and sinners, but the child still, and the child of a Father’s love.  Our Lord taught this in His own blessed prayer—­“Our Father;” and as we lose the meaning of that single word our, as we say my Father—­the Father of me and of my faction—­of me and my fellow believers—­my Anglicanism or my Judaism—­be it what it may—­instead of our Father—­the Father of the outcast, the profligate, of all who choose to claim a Father’s love; so we lose the meaning of the lesson which the Epiphany was designed to teach, and the possibility of building up a family to God.

2.  The recognition of a common Humanity.  He from whom the Church is named, took upon Him not the nature merely of the noble, of kings, or of the intellectual philosopher—­but of the beggar, the slave, the outcast, the infidel, the sinner, and the nature of every one struggling in various ways.  Let us learn then brother men, that we shall have no family in God, unless we learn the deep truth of our common Humanity, shared in by the servant and the sinner, as well as the sovereign.  Without this we shall have no Church—­no family in God.

 3.  Lastly, the Church of Christ proceeds out of, and rests upon, the
 belief in a common Sacrifice.

* * * * *

There are three ways in which the human race hitherto has endeavoured to construct itself into a family; first, by the sword; secondly, by an ecclesiastical system; and thirdly, by trade or commerce.  First, by the sword.  The Assyrian, the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman, have done their work—­in itself a most valuable and important one; but so far as the formation of mankind into a family was the object aimed at, the work of the sword has done almost nothing.