You are praying and longing for the happy time when God's children shall all be one, but are you willing that the "once more" shaking shall have its designed effect in your own case? Do you, indeed, suffer the Holy Ghost fire to consume out of your own life, heart, religion, and conversation, all the shaky chaff and stubble the devil has made to divide the children of God? Do you, indeed, withdraw from and ignore all churches, so called, but the one Christ purchased "with his own blood" and founded nearly nineteen hundred years ago, and to which the "Lord added" you by regeneration (Acts 2:47)? Do you discard every church title but that "which the mouth of the Lord hath named" (Isa. 62:2), even the name of the Father, in which Christ and the apostles kept the church (John 17:6,11,12; Acts. 20:28; 1 Cor. 1:2; 1 Tim. 3:15)? Do you honor the divine head of the church by rejecting every creed but the one that "is given by inspiration of God;" every door that is opened and shut by men; and every spirit but the Sanctifier; and every motive but the love of God and humanity? If you, by the grace of God, die to all these prime causes of sectism and their concomitant sins, then, and not until then, will the Lord have "thoroughly purged" so much of "his threshing floor" as you will have to answer for in the day of judgment. Where this is not accomplished, the grace of God is frustrated; holiness is not permitted to reach the Bible standard of thoroughness, nor spread its healing virtue to every part of the soul.
It may look foolish to many thus to blow the trumpet of the Lord around the high and massy walls of sectarian glory and selfishness, but the power of God with the faith and shouts of the "holy people" will surely bring them down. Though the heaps of sectarian chaff have reached the magnitude of mountains, God has some wheat scattered through them, and he will have it separated for his garner. Therefore he says to Jacob, "Fear not ... thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and thou shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them."
The pure elements of God's church possess a wonderful inherent attraction and cohesion; but the devil neutralizes the divine cement by mixing in his chaffy and sloughy trash, thereby effecting divisions; therefore, the Lord restores union by the "removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made" by the enemy, thus removing discord and schism. Glory to God! Little Jacob has barely commenced threshing and separating. Soon we shall see clouds of chaff driven by the "mighty rushing wind from heaven."
Says Bro. I. Reed, in his paper, The Highway: "The great holiness movement is shaking harder than ever. It is to be a real moral earthquake yet. We have nothing to fear in that direction. We have allied ourselves to the Power that does the shaking, and feel a kind of holy joy at the falling walls, reeling Babels and ecclesiastical fortifications that can not stand the grand holiness shock. In anticipation we enjoy the grand smash-up of things semi-religious—this half and half, linsey-woolsey type of 'Good God, Dear Mammon,' kind of fashionable moral froth, too often called 'religion'—that is coming some of these days. It is coming. We hear the tread of the mighty army."
Amen. Let the conflict come. God will have a pure church. He will shake the chaffy works of the devil out of his kingdom, though all hell be moved in rage; though Gog and Magog surround the camp of the saints on the breadth of the whole earth.
Dear reader, I am aware that I have here written things that will be unwelcome to many, truths that will assail and stir up many prejudices; but in doing so I have determined to cast from me the fear of man, and clear my conscience in the sight of God.
It is, indeed, my honest conviction that the great holiness reform can not go forward with the sweeping power and permanent triumph that God designs it should until the gospel be so preached and consecration become so thorough that the blood of Christ may reach and wash away every vestige of denominational distinction, and "perfect into one"—yea, one indeed and in truth—all the sanctified.
I am aware that this will elicit storms of persecution, but in the name of the Lord it must come. God will be glorified in the escape of his holy children from all human enclosures into the "one" and identical "fold of Jesus Christ." Oh! let us be honest before God in this matter.