To think, then, that the tip of your prayer and mine, the sweetest thing we can give, is poisoned, and shot into a rural community, there to hurt—Well the words are not so much wanting to express my indignation and yours, as the mind fails to comprehend how such tactless blunders can happen.
“Why do these church bodies do this wicked thing?” you enquire.
Let the words of a high church official I once knew convey to you not so much the real reason, as the state of mind out of which the thing grows!
“So long as there is a family of our faith in that village, that family shall have the sacraments of our faith ministered to it.”
He might just as well have added, “even though the heavens fall”; for what he did was to force a subsidy into a community to help a small faction of his particular church to survive when the majority of the people, even the majority of his own little church organization, had voted voluntarily to cut down the number of churches and eliminate the unnecessary one. The high church official just ripped open a community sore, when it had begun to heal. He poured gall in again after somebody had sweetened community life for a moment.
A New Religious Ethics Between Churches
The egotism of a particular church group; the flaunting individualism of a particular denominational combination of persons, whose personal egos are, religiously, to be subjected, but whose combined ego is to be exalted! Here is an uncharted sea of ethics and religion between church groups. Shall it not be discussed? Especially when it grinds the rural community to powder? Shall it be good Christianity for one Christian sect to crowd and shove just like a bully in a mob?
The day and generation is getting suspicious of pietists of all sorts who can tell sinners how to behave individually to one another; yes, who can even tell the labor group how to behave to the employer group and the employer group to the labor group, but who have no conception of what Christian principles apply as between one church group and another church group in the realm of religion, except to beat the other church group at all costs. If I were not heart and soul captured by the character, life, philosophy, and guidance of Jesus himself, if I were not thrilled by his words, and electrified by his life and death, more and more the older I grow, I should be tempted to see in this cutthroat group egotism of competitive Christian church groups a decline of Christianity itself.
“They all do it” is a lame excuse for sinners; but for a church body, it is tragic. Think of a million people, more or less, possessing one shibboleth, trying to embody earnestly the Christ, while deliberately hamstringing another Christian church body which is doing the same thing!
But who is to blame? Whose sin is this prostitution of a holy thing?