This busy, helpful, institutional church, welcoming under one roof men of all degrees, to broaden, sweeten, and enlighten their lives, need ask no more of those who accept its service than that they believe in a God who ever lives and loves, and in Christ, who appeared on earth in His name to preach justice, mercy, charity, and kindness. I should not debate metaphysics through a barred wicket with men who needed the spiritual or physical help of the church, any more than my neighbor, Smith, that prince of good fellows, would ask a hungry tramp to saw a cord of wood before he gave him his breakfast.
Questions of liturgy can hardly be a bar, nor can the validity of Christian orders in one body or another weigh heavily with any who are sincerely concerned for the life of the church and the widening of its influence. “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd.” I have watched ministers in practically every Christian church take bread and break it, and bless the cup, and offer it in the name of Jesus, and I have never been able to feel that the sacrament was not as efficacious when received reverently from one as from another.
If wisdom and goodness are God, then foolish, indeed, is he who would “misdefine these till God knows them no more.” The unified seven-day church would neglect none of “the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith,” in the collecting of tithe of mint and anise and cummin. It would not deny its benefits to those of us who are unblest with deep spiritual perception, for it is by the grace of God that we are what we are. “I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit and I will sing with the understanding also. Else if thou bless with the spirit, how shall he that filleth the place of the unlearned say the Amen at thy giving of thanks, seeing he knoweth not what thou sayest?”
“Hath man no second life?—Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in Heaven our sins to see?—
More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us? Ah, let us try
If we, then, too, can be such men as he!”
Somewhere there is a poem that relates the experience of a certain humble priest, who climbed the steeple of his church to commune more nearly with God. And, as he prayed, he heard the Voice answering, and asked, “Where art thou, Lord?” and the Lord replied, “Down here, among my people!”