[PERSONALITY OF THE DEVIL.]
DENYING the personality of the Devil. Here we have more negative preaching—more denying. What a world of gospel there is in this! Who is to be saved by denying the personality of the Devil? Who is comforted and built up with this sort of stuff? The infidel laughs. The Universalist nods assent; but who repents? The scoffer is delighted. That is the man for him! But does he quit scoffing? We have recently heard of a man who had stripped his feet bare after a rain of a warm summer’s day, and, walking up through the mud to an old preacher, denied the personality of the Devil; when the preacher, pointing behind the man, replied: “He must be alive and personal, for there is his track fresh in the mud!” Another preacher allowed that when the Devil has a man so completely blinded that he does not believe there is any Devil, or that he is a personal being, he never expects to have any more trouble with him. He will never listen to the truth any more.
[CLERICAL YOUNG PASTORS.]
THAT there should be occasionally a young man, with the views that have been fostered and encouraged by some among us, of a “pastorate,” who would assume authority to cast persons out of the church, and give letters of commendation, is not strange. There were some even in the time of the apostles, when no such views of a “pastorate” existed, who assumed such prerogatives and “prated against us” (the apostles.) In III. John 9, 10, we have a reference to one of them. “I wrote to the church,” says John, “but Diotrephes, who loves to have the pre-eminence among them, receives us not. Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his deeds which he does, prating against us with malicious words: and not content therewith, neither does he himself receive the brethren, and forbids them that would, and casts them out of the church.” We have fallen on the track of a few young men, and some old ones, of this stripe; but their race is short. The brethren, whatever else is true of them, are not prepared for clerical assumptions. They will not have the manacles put on them. Such men will not trouble us long. Some of them will go over to sectarianism at once, thinking that the shortest road to a “pastorate.” Others will go to law, medicine, or to nothing. But the main body of our young men are true and noble in the highest sense, as humble and faithful as can be found anywhere. They are studying to know and do the will of God. We are not sure that, as a class, they are not generally sounder than their instructors in the gospel.
We regret to see anything like collision or rivalry between old and young preachers. Young men get a little fast sometimes, and old men become a little cross; but these matters will all work their way out. As a humorous writer said some years ago, after writing a long piece about nothing, as a burlesque on certain persons, “We are all poor critters.” We need a great deal of mercy and grace.