Article July 24, 1909 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Silas McBee, Robert Stuart MacArthur, G. Campbell Morgan

[Silas McBee in Churchman.]

Our Lord spoke a language and lived a life which was understood by the people, and the common people heard him gladly. He did not invite them into some vague spiritualized organization, but he enlisted them in his work, which was to go about doing good. They were his disciples, his body of disciples. There is not to be found in him or in his teaching, or in the whole of the New Testament Scriptures, any individualistic or isolated conception of Christianity or of Christian life. He dealt with every phase of life with which he came in contact, and he dealt with it as the common work of God and the brethren. It is not so with Christendom today. There is something vague and indefinable about the spiritual kingdom into which men are invited. Christendom as a whole does not work at the real and actual things of life, because in its divisions it does not work as a unit. And none of the churches of divided Christendom are willing in their corporate organized capacity to work at, much less to work out, the great social, political, industrial, and economic problems that face men and society at every turn. They insist that as spiritual forces their true domain is something apart and separate from these so-called worldly affairs. They maintain that they are great spiritual institutions, whose business it is to produce spiritual lives, which in their individual capacity will work these reforms, as economists, politicians, philanthropists, and such like. Thus the incalculable and irresistible influence of the organized family of God, that corporate life which gives to the Christian church something that was never given to the world before in its fulness is left unused.

[New-Church Messenger.]

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