In testing Christianity, then, I remark first that it is to be tested not by creeds, but by conduct. The evidence of the gospel, the reality of the gospel that is preached in schools or churches, is to be found in the spirit that is developed by it, not in the technical creeds that men have constructed out of it. The biography of men who have died might be hung up in their sepulchres; but you could not tell what kind of a man this one had been, just by reading his life there--while he lay dead in dust before you. There are thousands of churches that have a creed of Christianity hung up in them, but the church itself is a sepulchre full of dead men's bones; and indeed, many churches in modern times are gnawing the bones of their ancestors, and doing almost nothing else.
The gospel, changed from a spirit of humanity into a philosophical system of doctrine, is perverted. It is not the gospel. The great heresy in the world of religion is a cold heart, not a luminous head. It is not that intelligence is of no use in religion. By no means. Neither would we wage a crusade against philosophical systems of moral truth. But where the active sympathy and humanity of loving hearts for living men, and for men in the ratio in which they are low, is laid aside or diminished to a minimum, and in its place is a well-elaborated philosophical system of moral truths, hewn and jointed,--the gospel is gone. If you go along the sea-shores, you will often find the shells of fish--the fish dead and gone, the shells left. And if you go along the shores of ecclesiastical organization, you will find multitudes of shells of the gospel, out of which the living substance has gone long ago. Organized Christianity--that is, the institutions of Christianity have been in the first instance its power, and in the second instance its damnation. The moment you substitute the machinery of education for education itself, the moment you build schools and do not educate, build colleges that do not increase knowledge in the pupils, you have sacrificed the aim for the instrument by which you were to gain that aim. In churches, the moment it is more important to maintain buildings, rituals, ministers, chanters, and all the paraphernalia of moral education than the spirit of personal sympathy, the moment these are more sacred to men than is the welfare of the population round about which they were set to take care of, that very moment Christ is dead in that place; that very moment religion in the midst of all its institutions has perished. I am bound to say that in the history of the world, while religious institutions have been valuable and have done a great deal of good, they have perhaps done as much harm as good. There is scarcely one single perversion of civil government, there is scarcely one single persecution of men, there is scarcely a single one of the great wars that have depopulated the globe, there is scarcely one great heresy developed out of the tyranny of the church, that has not been the fruit of institutional religion; while that spirit of humanity which was to give the institution its motive power has to a certain extent died out of it.
Secondly, churches organized upon elective affinities of men are contrary to the spirit of the gospel. We may associate with men who are of like taste with ours. We have that privilege. If men are knowledgeable and intellectual, there is no sin in their choosing for intimate companions and associates men of like pursuits and like intellectual qualities. That is right. If men are rich, there is no reason why men who hold like property should not confer with each other, and form interests and friendships together. If men are refined, if they have become æsthetic, there is no reason why they should not associate in the realm of beauty, artists with artists, nor why the great enjoyers of beauty should not be in sympathy. Exit all these are not to be allowed to do it at the price of abandoning common humanity; you have no right to make your nest in the boughs of knowledge, and let all the rest of the world go as it will. You have no right to make your home among those who are polished and exquisite and fastidious in their tastes, whose garments are beauty, whose house is a temple of art, and all whose associations are of like kind, and neglect common humanity. You have no right to shut yourself up in a limited company of those who are like you in these directions, and let all the rest of men go without sympathy and without care. It is a right thing for a man to salute his neighbor who salutes him; but if you salute those who salute you, says Christ, what thank have ye--do not even the publicans so? It is no sin that a man, being intellectual in his nature, should like intellectual people, and gratify that which is divine and God-like in him; but if, because he likes intellectual people, he loses all interest in ignorant people, it convicts him of depravity and of moral perversion. When this is carried out to such an extent that churches are organized upon sharp classification, upon elective affinities, they not only cease to be Christian churches, but they are heretical; not perhaps in doctrine, but worse than that, heretical in heart.
The fact is that a church needs poor men and wicked men as much as it does pure men and virtuous men and pious men. What man needs is familiarity with universal human nature. He needs never to separate himself from men in daily life. It is not necessary that in our houses we should bring pestilential diseases or pestilential examples, but somehow we must hold on to men if they are wicked; somehow the circulation between the top and the bottom must be carried on; somehow there must be an atoning power in the heart of every true believer of the Lord Jesus Christ who shall say, looking out and seeing that the world is lost, and is living in sin and misery, "I belong to it, and it belongs to me." When you take the loaf of society and cut off the upper crust, slicing it horizontally, you get an elect church. Yes, it is the peculiarly elect church of selfishness. But you should cut the loaf of society from the top down to the bottom, and take in something of everything. True, every church would be very much edified and advantaged if it had in it scholarly men, knowledgeable men; but the church is strong in proportion as it has in it something of everything, from the very top to the very bottom.
Now, I do not disown creeds--provided they are my own! Well, you smile; but that is the way it has been since the world began. No denomination believes in any creed except its own. I do not say that men's knowledge on moral subjects may not be formulated. I criticize the formulation of beliefs from time to time, in this: that they are very partial; that they are formed upon the knowledge of a past age, and that that knowledge perishes while higher and nobler knowledge comes in; that there ought to be higher and better forms; and that while their power is relatively small, the power of the spirit of humanity is relatively great. When I examine a church, I do not so much care whether its worship is to the one God or to the triune God. I do not chiefly care for the catechism, nor for the confession of faith, although they are both interesting. I do not even look to see whether it is a synagogue or a Christian church--I do not care whether it has a cross over the top of it or is Quaker plain. I do not care whether it is Protestant, Catholic, or anything else. Let me read the living--- the living book! What is the spirit of the people? How do they feel among each other? How do they feel toward the community? What is their life and conduct in regard to the great prime moral duty of man, "Love the Lord thy God and thy neighbor as thyself," whether he be obscure or whether he be smiling in the very plenitude of wealth and refinement? Have you a heart for humanity? Have you a soul that goes out for men? Are you Christ-like? Will you spend yourself for the sake of elevating men who need to be lifted up? That is orthodox. I do not care what the creed is. If a church has a good creed, that is all the more felicitous; and if it has a bad creed, a good life cures the bad creed.
One of the dangers of our civilization may be seen in the light of these considerations. We are developing so much strength founded on popular intelligence, and this intelligence and the incitements to it are developing such large property interests, that if the principle of elective affinity shall sort men out and classify them, we are steering to the not very remote danger of the disintegration of human society. I can tell you that the classes of men who by their knowledge, refinement, and wealth think they are justified in separating themselves, and in making a great void between them and the myriads of men below them, are courting their own destruction. I look with very great interest on the process of change going on in Great Britain, where the top of society had all the "blood," but the circulation is growing larger and larger, and a change is gradually taking place in their institutions. The old nobility of Great Britain is the lordliest of aristocracies existing in the world. Happily, on the whole, a very noble class of men occupy the high positions: but the spirit of suffrage, this angel of God that so many hate, is coming in on them; and when every man in Great Britain can vote, no matter whether he is poor or rich, whether he has knowledge or no knowledge, there must be a very great change. Before the great day of the Lord shall come, the valleys are to go up and the mountains are to come down; and the mountains have started already in Great Britain and must come down. There may be an aristocracy in any nation,--that is to say, there may be "best men"; there ought to be an aristocracy in every community,--that is, an aristocracy of men who speak the truth, who are just, who are intelligent: but that aristocracy will be like a wave of the sea; it has to be reconstituted in every generation, and the men who are the best in the State become the aristocracy of that State. But where rank is hereditary, if political suffrage becomes free and universal, aristocracy cannot live. The spirit of the gospel is democratic. The tendency of the gospel is leveling; leveling up, not down. It is carrying the poor and the multitude onward and upward.
It is said that democracies have no great men, no heroic men. Why is it so? When you raise the average of intelligence and power in the community it is very hard to be a great man. That is to say, when the great mass of citizens are only ankle-high, when among the Lilliputians a Brobdingnagian walks, he is a great man. But when the Lilliputians grow until they get up to his shoulder, he is not so great a man as he was by the whole length of his body. So, make the common people grow, and there is nobody tall enough to be much higher.
The remarkable people of this world are useful in their way; but the common people, after all, represent the nation, the age, and the civilization. Go into any town or city: do not ask who lives in that splendid house; do not say, This is a fine town, here are streets of houses with gardens and yards, and everything that is beautiful the whole way through. Go into the lanes, go into the back streets, go where the mechanic lives; go where the day-laborer lives. See what is the condition of the streets there. See what they do with the poor, with the helpless, and the mean. If the top of society bends perpetually over the bottom with tenderness, if the rich and strong are the best friends of the poor and needy, that is a civilized and a Christian community; but if the rich and the wise are the cream and the great bulk of the population skim-milk, that is not a prosperous community.
There is a great deal of irreligion in men, there is a great deal of wickedness and depravity in men, but there are times when it is true that the church is more dissipated than the dissipated classes of the community. If there is one thing that stood out more strongly than any other in the ministry of our Lord, it is the severity with which he treated the exclusiveness of men with knowledge, position, and a certain sort of religion, a religion of particularity and carefulness; if there is one class of the community against which he hurled his thunderbolts without mercy and predicted woes, it was the scribes, Pharisees, scholars, and priests of the temples. He told them in so many words, "The publican and the harlot will enter the kingdom of God before you." The worst dissipation in this world is the dry-rot of morality, and of the so-called piety that separates men of prosperity and of power from the poor and ignoble. They are our wards....