[CHAPTER XI.]
APPEAL TO THE CHURCH.
"And they shall teach my people the difference between the holy and profane, and cause them to discern between the unclean and the clean." Ezekiel xliv, 23.
On moral and religious questions compromise is treason to the right. Lafayette's witty and just illustration is well applied. He supposes two men to get into an altercation in regard to a fact in arithmetic. "Twice two is four," says the one, stoutly. "No", replies the other, "twice two is six." Both are immovable, and the dispute waxes warm. A third person approaches, and lays a hand gently upon each. "Gentlemen, reason is not infallible. The wisest men are sometimes in error. We are all prone to rush to extremes. You, my friend, affirm that twice two is four. You, who are equally my friend, affirm that twice two is six. Compromise, gentlemen, compromise. Meet each other half way. Agree to say, hereafter, that twice two is five."
Men are not lacking who, even in considering points of morals and religion, are ready to confess that really, after all, so far at least as their present information extends, twice two is somewhere about five. Nay, in their haste to meet what they style the demands of the age, some are ready to compromise at five and ninety-nine hundredths. And thus, all the way from what St. John calls "the camp of the saints and the beloved city" down to the place where Gog and Magog are gathering their hosts for battle, men are pitching their flimsy tents and raising their equivocal banners. It is a lamentable fact that among the chief obstacles to the progress of the Gospel we are compelled to count bodies that claim to belong to the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet have neither the heart to preach his doctrines nor the courage to proclaim his law. In all ages there have been sects of nominal Christians, who form a part of the Church of Christ in the same sense that the outside scales of a shell-bark hickory are a part of the tree, and who are ever ready to compromise with the world and tolerate all fashionable follies. Worldly men would manage the affairs of a Church in the same manner that they would conduct a political campaign. The argument is, that in order to be popular, and grow rapidly in numbers and in wealth, the Church must lay as few restrictions as possible upon candidates for admission, and as seldom as possible come into collision with the pleasures and the passions of the multitude.
Mr. Bright, in a recent speech in the British Parliament on the disestablishment of the Irish Church, gives, in a sentence or two, a correct description of this policy which we have here mentioned:
"The Right Honorable gentleman, the member from Bucks, argued very much in favor of the Established Church on the ground that there ought to be some place into which people can get who would not readily be admitted any where else. The fact is, what the Right Honorable gentleman wants is this: that we shall have an established Church which has no discipline, and that any one who will live up to what may be called a gentlemanly conformity to it may pass through the world as a very satisfactory sort of Christian."