Philip Schaff

"In relation to single Christians, the church is the mother from which they derive their religious life and to which they owe therefore constant fidelity, gratitude, and obedience; she is the power of the objective and general to which the subjective and single should ever be subordinate.

Only in such regular and rational subordination can the individual Christian be truly free; and his personal piety can as little come to perfection apart from an inward and outward communion with the life of church, as a limb separated from the body or a branch torn from the vine."

The Principle of Protestantism