Article December 7, 1912 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from William Pierson Merrill, John Hall, Frederick Hastings

[Christian Work and Evangelist.]

There is a very general disposition to make the test of real religion the morality it produces, rather than the profession of creeds, allegiance to a church, or an ecstatic state of being. This is right, for it is the Biblical test. The religious man of the Old Testament was one who did justly, showed mercy, and practised righteousness as he walked humbly with his God. The religious man of the New Testament is he who practised love toward all other men. By this fact the disciples of Christ were to be distinguished. The Biblical religion is always and everywhere aimed toward conduct. It goes at it fundamentally, of course, laying chief emphasis on a change of heart. But the heart is to be changed for the ultimate purpose of living a pure life and serving humanity. The last chapters of John's gospel, with their sublime insistence on man's possible oneness with God, find their logical outcome in the sermon on the mount, even if they themselves did not say that the branch would be known to be part of the real vine if it brought forth fruit.

The world is everywhere inclined just now to accept this Biblical test of real religion as its own, as must be evident to any one who is watching current tendencies, and we believe that the twentieth century is going to make this the supreme and perhaps the only test of Christian belief. "Does this man believe in Jesus Christ and accept him?" some one asks today. The answer is more and more coming to be, "Does he live like Jesus Christ?"

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