“Broad-Gauge Religion.”—Shall The Conflict Cease?
First. “A portion of the Church of England, comprising those who claim to hold a position, in respect to doctrine and fellowship, intermediate between the old High Church party and the modern Low Church, or evangelical party, a term of recent origin,” having originated in the last half century, “which has been loosely applied to other bodies of men holding liberal or comprehensive views of Christian doctrine and fellowship.”—Webster.
Side by side with these various shades of High and Low Church, another party of a different character has always existed in the Church of England. It is called by different names: Moderate, Catholic, or Broad Church, by its friends: Latitudinarian or Indifferent, by its enemies. Its distinctive character is the desire of comprehension. Its watchwords are charity and toleration.—Conybeare.
Broadgauge. This word is connected, in its origin, with railroads. Its radical idea is that of distance. It is credited by Webster to Simmonds in these words, “A wide distance (usually six or seven feet) between the rails on a railway, in contradistinction from the narrow gauge of four feet eight inches and a half.” The watch-word, “charity,” is a term that has been much abused. “Charity is a grace of heavenly mien.” It is the “end of the commandment.” “The law was not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless, and the disobedient, etc.” It is love, in the New Testament sense of the term, as modified by all the essential elements of the Christian religion, so it is “the fulfilling of the law.” It is not passion, but affection. To my sensuous life all my passions belong. The brute has also a sensuous life. But man has, in addition to this, an intellectual life. Passion always passes away with its object, but affection remains to soften the heart years after its object is gone.
My intellectual nature is the field of all legitimate gospel operations with reference to the production of a Christian life and character. As a divine affection, charity or love springs out of union with God, or being made a “partaker of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lusts.” Such being the height of its bed-rock, it is said, “Every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.” And it is also said, “He that saith I know him and keepeth not his commandments is a liar.” This strong language correlates with the fact that charity expresses the idea of love as an attribute of divine life, known as the life of God. It is an attribute belonging to those who have made the high attainment of a spiritual or mental condition which places them beyond the need of penal laws to restrain them from crime. Its measure is the love of God. Its full import may be expressed in these words, loving as God loves.
After enumerating many of the Christian graces an apostle said, Above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness. So charity, or rather its possessor, is [pg 217] no willful truth “butcherer,” for charity believeth all things (or all truth); hopeth all things (promised); rejoiceth, not in iniquity, but in the truth. It has no “stock” in known error, for it “abounds in all knowledge and judgment,” and “approves things that are excellent.” It is noble and right to let “love,” or “charity have her perfect work,” to be, or rather try to be, as charitable as God himself; but it is absurd and preposterous to go beyond or try to be more charitable. “It is enough that the disciple be as his master.”
Men are guilty of this presumption when they, in feigned charity, go beyond the word of the Lord, or beyond the truth in their expressions of kindness.
There is a great deal of love in this world that lacks the elements of perfectness. It is not the “love of God,” or loving as God loves. It is not the attribute of a divine life. There is no charity in influencing a person, willfully, to stop short or go beyond the truth in Christian faith or obedience. There is no charity in giving a man money knowingly to purchase whisky to get drunk upon. Charity never conflicts with truth or right. On the contrary, it endeavors to bring all men to the standard of truth and rectitude.
The phrase “Broad-gauge” seems to have been gotten up to express the idea of an intelligent relaxation from “human creeds” as bonds of union and fellowship. In this sense we all ought to be the advocates of “Broad-gauge religion.” We should cultivate the spirit of gospel liberality until we utterly disregard and put away all human creeds.
It is a trite saying, that one extreme begets another; against this error we should guard with great caution. To succeed in religion, we must remember, always, that we have in the word of God a standard of truth and right that will always govern us according to heaven's will. Many persons, forgetting this truth, have been led to conclude that departures from the word of truth, as a matter of “liberality,” or “broad-gauge religion,” are justifiable. And, as “liberalists,” or “broad-gauge Christians,” they are disposed to recognize all the existing divisions in faith and practice that are known in [pg 218] Christendom. They even go further and allow that somehow all are right, and will stand upon an equality in the righteous judgement of God. This is not perfect love. Charity, over and above a kindly feeling towards those who are in error, is unfaithfulness to the truth, to God, and to the very best interests of our humanity. It is, in all such cases, love run mad! A man should never get so broad in his religion as to be unfaithful to truth.
The phraseology has also been appropriated by skeptics and semi-infidels to popularize their own semi-infidel philosophy, which they love to denominate “free thought.” Deists, Pantheists and Atheists have seized upon the phrase and appropriated it to their ungodly speculations. It is true that others, in getting away from their old creeds, have run past the standard of truth and right. All this wildness in the standardless field of thought, where Hobbes and other infidels reveled, without any guide save the civil law, has been denominated “Broad-gauge religion,” and “Liberalism.”
We should always remember that going beyond the truth and the eternal laws of right is libertinism or lawlessness.
“Charity,” extending, or reaching out thus, is no longer “charity,” or “perfect love.” Such expressions of love are misdirected, and, if knowingly done, are blameworthy. Charity is governed by the perfect law of truth; when it is not destitute of its own divine nature it conducts us in the “straight and narrow way.”
“Long as of life the joyous hours remain,
Let on this head unfading flowers reside,
There bloom the vernal rose's earliest pride;
And when, our flames commissioned to destroy,
Age step 'twixt Love and me, and intercept the joy;
When my changed these locks no more shall know,
And all its petty honors turn to snow;
Then let me rightly spell of Nature's ways;
To Providence, to him my thoughts I'd raise,
And love as he throughout remaining days.”
—Gray.
We should cherish a kind feeling for all our fellows, and in doing this we should not forget our duty to point them to truth in word and example, to be ever faithful to truth.
There are two great fields of thought for the exercise of the Christian intellect of the present times. One is the corruptions of Roman Catholic religion, and the other is the corruptions of Protestant religions.
That both are great feeder-dams to infidelity and skepticism is demonstrated by the infidel productions of the day. The dogma of ecclesiastic authority set up in opposition to reason and scientific discovery is the infidel's devil, and a very poor devil at that. For, when the Pope has interfered to settle a question it has often happened that his decisions were wrong.
On March 5, 1616, the congregation of the Index published a decree condemning as “false, unscriptural and destructive of Catholic truth,” the opinion that the earth moves round the sun. It is denied by Roman theologians that Paul IV., who set the Index at work and agreed with its decisions, was responsible for this decree, but the preponderance of evidence is against them. It is known that this Pope presided in a congregation of the Inquisition on February 25, 1616, in which, after this same opinion, that the sun is the center of our universe, had been described as “absurd, philosophically false and formally heretical, because expressly contrary to holy scripture;” and the opinion that the earth is not the center of the universe, but moves, and that daily, “absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith;” Cardinal Bellamine was appointed to visit Galileo, the astronomer, and order him to give up these false opinions under pain of imprisonment for refusal. It was thus that the congregation of the Index took action and published its decree a week later.
In 1633 Galileo, having continued to propagate his views, was called on by the Inquisition to retract and abjure, and the formal notice to him to do so states expressly that the declaration of 1616 was made by the Pope himself, and that resistance to it was, therefore, heresy, contrary to the doctrine of [pg 220] the Catholic and Apostolic Church. On being brought to trial, Galileo made a formal abjuration, and on June 30th Pope Urban VIII. ordered the publication of the sentence, thereby, according to Roman ecclesiastical law, making Galileo's compulsory denial of the earth's motion binding on all Christians as a theological doctrine. Infidels have a vast deal to say about such an abominable manifestation of ecclesiastic tyranny and unscientific and unscriptural nonsense. All intelligent Roman Catholics of to-day reject the judgment of Popes Paul IV. and Urban VIII. as absurd, and scientifically and scripturally false. There is not so much as a hint at papal authority found in the three old creeds known as the Apostles', the Nicene and the Athanasian, nor in any ancient gloss upon them. Neither can we find in them any of the distinguishing special doctrines of the Church of Rome.
Christianity came from the hands of Christ and his apostles in all its perfections, and as long as infidels stop short of the New Testament itself, and short of Christ and his apostles, in their warfare, we may well believe that all their efforts to blot out Christianity will be vain. Protestants themselves have demurred as much as infidels against the errors of the Roman Catholic Church, and fully as much against the errors of each other as denominations. “Truth stands true to her God, man alone deviates.”
The greatest difficulty that Christianity ever encountered is the ignorance and imperfections of its own friends. Protestant errors are many and serious. But why should the genuine be discarded on account of the existence of the counterfeit? And why should we shut our eyes to the importance of the great work of establishing truth, to the destruction of all Catholic and Protestant errors of faith and practice by becoming the advocates of false charity through the adoption of “broad-gauge religion,” in a “broad-gauge church?” Infidels who, like Col. Ingersoll, assert that “no man can control his belief,” had better look in a glass and see themselves as others see them, before they strive to conquer a victory for the black [pg 221] demon of despair, by fastening the absurd philosophy of fatalism upon all the world. If men can not help their belief, who is to blame? Surely, neither Roman Catholics, nor Protestants, nor those who managed “thumbscrews” and “hot irons,” and other condemned instruments of the dark ages, nor yet those who now live to be the “butt” of Colonel Ingersoll's satire and ridicule. A kind feeling for all, and unfaithfulness to the truth—never!