Article June 25, 1904 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from John Bascom

In much of this discussion it seems taken for granted that the Church has a right to be heeded and given reverence, just because it is the Church. To those who are outside of the Church, this is not an axiom; they must first be persuaded that the Church has something worth their heeding before they will heed it. They, at least, make a practical distinction between the institution and its religion, between churchism and Christianity. In this respect it is well to turn from the injunctions of the Church to the example of the one whose name the Church bears. Jesus of Nazareth, himself a young man, gathered young men about him. He did not insist on their going to the Jewish church; he himself went both to the Temple and the synagogue, but, except as he complied with those laws which made the priest an inspector of health, we have no record that he urged any one else to go. What Jesus Christ was concerned in doing was not in building up an organization, but in creating character—individual character, social character; not in bringing people into right relation with the Church, but into right relation with themselves and with their God. While, therefore, the question. Why do not young men go to church? is an important one, the vital question is, Why does not the spirit and character of Christ more prevail?

The Outlook.

The test of revelation does not lie in itself, but in its correspondence with facts, its disclosure of things. It has been a constant and disastrous mistake in theology to suppose that a certain verbal advantage was given us by revelation; that words, as footprints of thought, might be scented and pursued till the grandest truths were overtaken and pulled down. If we had locked upon the phenomena of life as interpreters of revelation, as we have made revelation the expounder of these phenomena, we should have fallen into no such absolute rendering of depravity, redemption, salvation, the justice of God and His dealings with men, as has characterized our theology.

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