Look at the prophecy of Hosea, and what is there said of all Israel in the name of Ephraim. Read the seventh chapter. The Prophet is reproving the sins of the princes, and the great men of Israel. “All their kings are fallen.” The flame of civil discord has spread, and dried up the sources of legitimate authority among them. An anarchy of eleven years, after the death of Jeroboam II., has terminated in the assassination of Zachariah and his successors Shallum and Pekahiah. “And yet there is none among them that calleth unto Me,” saith the Lord.
And then, he denounces judgment against the people in the mass, for their hypocrisy and unfaithfulness. Whereas, by God’s institution, they were a peculiar people,—witnesses for God, and separate from the world, “they have mixed themselves among the people,”—that is, among the idolaters of the land,—they are “as a cake not turned,” as a cake baked only on one side; serving God by halves, halting between two masters; worshipping God a little, and worshipping idols a little, and worshipping nothing much. And so, as a consequence, what must have followed, did follow. The Syrians, in the time of Jehoahaz, reduced them to great straits. They had but fifty horsemen and ten chariots, and ten thousand footmen. [5] They were “made like the dust by threshing.” Shortly after, in the days of Menahem, they became tributaries to Pul, king of Assyria. [6] And at length they were carried away captive bodily by Shalmaneser.
Now, all this has a forcible application to a spiritual state of things, and sets forth the condition of the Church in the world, as at other times, so especially at this time in which we live.
Ephraim is the witness of God—testifying God’s Truth,—bearing God’s commission—appointed in the world to win and attract the people,—to draw them upward, far above worldly measures of things to the divine measure of things—to the things which shall be in the eternal Future, and to the fixed and unchangeable will of God, on which that eternal Future stands. But “Ephraim hath mixed himself” with the people,—he has “learned their inventions,”—he has adapted his witness to their demands,—he has lowered his standard of God’s appointment to the people’s standard of human construction. So that God’s teaching and man’s teaching have become confused and indifferently accepted, and they who have fallen into grave errors of faith are in no sense differently esteemed from those who have maintained the truth as revealed by God, and as witnessed by the Church in every land, in every age, by every tongue.
And so, the spiritual Ephraim, who was set up for a witness to the truth, has become “a cake not turned,” a half-equipped soldier in the fight, with but half a heart to his Master’s service.
What is the occasion which now presses? While many of us are praising God in grateful love for His unspeakable mercy in vouchsafing us His Truth—His determinate and fixed Truth—in which alone souls are saved—His Truth, as divinely committed to the Church “the pillar and ground of the Truth,”—and handed down from age to age in every land,—His Truth as mercifully retained and maintained in the Prayer Book of the Church of England,—set forth with categorical precision in the three Creeds of universal Christendom, and expanded and applied in the offices of Holy Baptism and the Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ—while we are keeping solemn festival to the Glory of God, and the power of His Truth, the “religious world” is exciting itself with vexing hopes and fears about the decennial Census which the State is about to take of the religious condition of the country.
I do not believe that this question excites churchmen, or that they care, except as a matter of political justice, what becomes of it. For themselves they know what they are, and where they stand, and in Whom they trust. And they are “ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh them a reason of the hope that is in them.” With no “uncertain sound,” or doubting heart, but with plainness and boldness, as Christian men and women, “standing fast in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the Gospel, and nothing terrified by their adversaries.” [8]
But it is a question full of importance, because of the evidence which it draws out of the condition of men’s minds among whom we live, and because of the lesson which that evidence reads to ourselves.
I do not enter upon the question whether it is right or wrong for the state to ask people about their religion. My own conviction is that, under the distracting circumstances of religion in this country, it would be better and wiser for the state to abstain. And yet in common sense the state may as well demand information as to my religious profession, as in respect of my age or worldly calling. But the question having been raised, what is this evidence which it has brought to light, and which I say is so grave in its results? There is a vehement, almost a passionate resistance of the proposition, that men should give an account of their faith.
It is true that Jesus Christ, the very Saviour and Redeemer of our souls, has said, “Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him will I confess also before My Father which is in heaven; and whosoever shall deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven.” [9a] But people on all sides are saying, “not so—not before men,—religion is a private and secret matter between God and me.”