From the various churches and religious denominations, into which you Christians are divided, there arises a new unifying element, a noble aspiration, restraining too great impulsiveness, leveling dividing barriers, and working for the realization of the one holy church through all the children of redemption.
(441)
Church, Obligations to the—See [Obligations to the Church].
CHURCH ONLY A MEANS
A church is like the steps leading in to a beautiful mansion, but you do not sit down on the steps, you do not set up a tent on the steps, you do not live on the steps—the steps lift you to the level of the warm room, the blazing winter’s fire, the bower of home that receives you out of the driving rain or pelting snow. All the ordinances of the Church are steps that lead to the house of character, adorned with all those rich treasures, named truth, gentleness, meekness and justice and sympathy. The Church is a hostelry in which man stops for a night on his journey home. The end of the Church is character.—N. D. Hillis.
(442)
CHURCH SERVICES
Dr. Donald Sage Mackay remarks on the effects on communities of neglect of church attendance:
One of the papers in New York has been making a personal examination into the political morals of a certain New England State. It has been alleged that politically that State is rotten, that its voters are regularly bought and sold at every election. A detailed description of each of the most corrupt towns in that State was given, and this was the appalling fact brought out: The worst towns (some of them with a few hundred inhabitants), where bribery was most persistent, where illegal liquor-selling was most rampant, where immorality was most flagrant, were those towns in which there was no resident minister and where no Christian service was regularly held. For instance, in one town known as “darkest Exeter,” there were twenty years ago six churches; four of them are in ruins to-day, two are occasionally used, but there is no resident minister. The result is “darkest Exeter”—a New England farming town, once peopled by the sturdy sons of the Pilgrim, heir to all the noble qualities of a sturdy race.—“The Religion of the Threshold.”
(443)