Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

THE passage forms a picture—God on His throne, Christ by His side, the work of the Churches on earth travelling up to God, and presenting itself before the throne Divine, and Christ, as the Churches pass in procession, judging them. The religious activity of the Church in Sardis swept by before God's throne, under Christ's eyes, and as it passed He saw that not one single task undertaken by that Church was done fully; everything was half done, and therefore worthless. It was not that the church was doing nothing, but it was doing nothing worth doing. These were the facts. Christ's judgment on the facts is this: "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead." A Church all whose labours are but half done is dead. Yet there were good men and women in the congregation at Sardis. If you read on you find this said by Christ: "Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments."

So, then, a Church may be dead though it contains living members. How can that be? A Church is not a mere number of individuals added to one another; something results from that combination of separate individuals; something very different, with fresh powers and added responsibilities, rises out of grouping together a number of individual Christians, that is a Church. A Church, a congregation (it is in that sense I use the word "Church" all through this discourse), has an individuality of its own; a Church has a character of its own; a Church has a spirit of its own; a Church has capacities of its own; a Church can do what no individual nor any mere number of individuals added together can do; a Church, as soon as it is constituted, creates a new kind of life, a new kind of being, a new kind of activities. No individual Christian, however good he may be, can out of himself make Christian fellowship, Christian devotion, Christian labour and co-operation, all that social life which springs from the union of severed individuals; no separate Christian, nor any number of separate Christians, can produce that. A Church, therefore, is something distinct from the individual members of whom it is built. A house is not a thousand bricks; it is something quite different, something made not merely by the presence of the bricks, but by their being built together. Each separate element of the building, when united, is able to do its share in the great work that none of them, or any member of them, could do without that combination which forms the edifice. A Church, a congregation, has its own character. Each provincial town in England has a character of its own; and an intelligent man, with quick sympathies, recognises the difference of spirit when he enters a town from that which was prevalent in the town he left. One is Radical, one is very Materialistic; one is full of poetry, and imagination, and literature; and the individual residing in the town is affected by the general spirit of that town. Every school has a character of its own, a spirit of its own; not that each boy in the school is just modelled on that type, but to a large extent each individual pupil is affected by the spirit of the school. The spirit of the school exists in the boys that dominate it. It is the same with Churches. In one congregation you are conscious of warmth, and enthusiasm, and friendliness, and love; in another congregation you are conscious of stiffness, and a rigid propriety, and distance, and coldness, and artificiality. In one Church you are conscious of a large, and liberal, and generous spirit; in another Church you are conscious of factions, fighting, and meanness and stinginess. That is a fact; you have felt it. A mere stranger entering the building on a Sunday morning feels it; it is there, there in the very faces of the people as they sit in their pews, there in the minister as he stands in the pulpit. A public speaker said to me this last week, "I may come with my address to a weekday meeting, but it all depends upon the spirit and mood of the meeting; it is one thing in one place, and another in another;" and if you have ever tried to speak in a Church or at a meeting you will have found it to be so. There may be a dozen men present in that meeting whose spirit is all that you may want, but they cannot make the result; the general result of it is determined by the mass. So it may come to pass that in a congregation there may be not a few individual members who are warm, living, earnest servants of Jesus Christ; but their goodness is not of the dominating kind; they have piety, but they lack manly power; they have good feeling and good intentions, but they have not character; they cannot command the whole; they cannot give their spirit to the mass of men; they just survive, but they cannot take the offensive; they have need of protection. They live themselves, but do not live half so strongly or half so healthily as they would in a congregation which was warm to the very tips of its fingers and the fringes of its garments; they are living, but the Church is dead.

What is the life of a Church? The life of a Church is loving loyalty to Jesus Christ, present more or less in the actual human heart of all the members; an inner, hidden thing, that you cannot weigh in a balance, that you cannot set down in figures in an annual report, that you cannot exhibit to a non-believer or a worldling, but the greatest, the most powerful force in all our world.

The life of a Church is a living, real presence of Jesus Christ, as a daily influence on the conduct, the thoughts, the words, the deeds of all the members of that Church. The life of a Church is the living presence of Jesus Christ in every committee of management, in every meeting of Sunday-school teachers, in every social gathering of the congregation; a living loyalty and devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ, born out of a grateful certainty that He died to save us, born out of a grand sympathy with Him, and under the belief that He is willing to save all the men and women and all the little children who are round about us. That is the living life of a Church, and nothing else is. You may have a perfect orthodoxy, and death; you may have great activity, and yet you may have death. Nothing is the life of a Church but actual living loyalty and love to the real living Lord of the Church, Jesus Christ.

Christ stands at the right hand of God, judging the Churches. He judges them by their works. But the life of a Church is not a thing of the hands or of the tongue; it is a thing of the heart. At the same time Christ has to make His judgment just; He has to go upon visible facts, and He can safely proceed upon the Church's work. Wherever there is life it cannot be still; it works, it moves, it beats, it becomes warmed; it must come out. If a Church has no works it has no life. What are those works which are the visible signs of a living Church? They are these: No dry, spasmodic zeal for orthodoxy when some heresy crops up which makes a public sensation; no straight, rigid propriety, and fineness of outward form, and æsthetic culture of ceremonial. The life that is loving loyalty to Christ, present in the heart of every individual member of a congregation, comes out in this way: it makes hearty singing on a Sunday. Even a man who has no musical voice, and who is a little weary, cannot help singing when his heart is stirred, even if he stops short in case he should make discord to his neighbours. It is all nonsense to say that people have grateful hearts to Christ when they sit with shut mouths to Christ's praise. I know well that habit has a great deal to do with it. It is the way of some Churches to sing heartily, and it is the way of some other Churches to let the choir do the singing; and I know, therefore, that you must not too absolutely take such a test as a standard by which you will judge whether or not there is a living warmth, and enjoyment, and cheering in the service and in the congregation. I believe all that, nevertheless I have seen the most stiff and silent congregation roused to sing when their hearts were aroused. Such silence is a bad habit. And how about the prayers? Men will not merely listen to the words, and will not criticise a man when he prays; men will be reverent; men will, by their very attitude, make it felt that souls are face to face with God. Men will not be sitting finding fault with all the blurs and blemishes that there are in the services (which there must be in every human service) when their hearts are being fed, and when their souls are going out to God. There will be no lack of Sunday-school teachers; and the Sunday-school teachers in such a Church will not do their work in a listless and negligent way, and fail in keeping their appointments and engagements, but will do it as if it were a pleasure. It is not the blame of Sunday-school teachers in a dead Church if they are teachers of that sort; it is the blame of the dead Church. How can they keep alive? Shall we put the penalty upon those who are partially living? No; it is the great mass of death, and decay, and coldness which is to blame. Let us visit the sins on the guilty parties.

A living Church will show its life in hearty, generous liberality to every good cause. A living Church will show its life by bravery and courage in taking up new responsibilities that may offer themselves, and working them most heartily. A living Church is living, not because it does one or all of these things, but because it loves loyalty to the Lord Jesus, who died for it, and feels that goodness and holiness are the grandest things in the world, and is eager to have all the children taught to love the Lord Jesus, and all the young people who are going out amid the temptations of life strengthened and helped to withstand them, and old people whose lives are embittered when a disaster comes upon them made tender, and soft, and submissive, by the life of Christ in that Church and among their Christian neighbours. Yes, the life of a Church is not a mere liking for what Christ loves, and a wish to please Him, but real life and real love to Christ will come out, not in correctness of creed, but in life and in work. It is an awful thing when a Church is dead, with all the children in it gathering to go to a Church which is cold, and to a dragging service, and to spiritless singing, and to melancholy prayer, and to a dry preaching. Ay, I have seen children who hated religion, because their parents, as I believe, were living in a dead Church. I have often said, "Cut your connection with such a Church; go rather to another denomination, which has life." I venture to say that a father who loves his child will sacrifice anything in order that that child may have pleasant and attractive views of religion. But shall the child's first idea of religion come to him in the shape of a crippled and broken-down failure? Fathers and mothers are absolutely bound thus to promote the spiritual interests of their children; it is worth more than anything else that is done for them; and I say that a Church which is gathering those young people around it, and keeping them from more dangerous places, and leading them to have it in their hearts to come and sit down with Christian people, is doing more than all the world will ever do. It is worth taking a great deal of trouble to belong to a living Church, and it is the absolute duty of every member of every Church to do all he can not merely to make himself alive, but to make the whole Church full of warm, living life.

When a Church is dead, or only half alive, the defect shows itself specifically and certainly in this manner: The Church's work is only half done, and can only half be fulfilled, when only a portion of its members fulfil their allotted task to their Master. If, in a Church which numbers five hundred, only fifty are doing the utmost they can do, the Church's measure of work will not be fulfilled before the judgment-seat of God. Fifty individuals cannot do what it takes five hundred to do. A half-done work, how it is spoiled! The army were defending the frontier bravely and successfully; but one cowardly regiment gave way, and the ranks were broken, and all the bravery, and the blood, and the death of the brave men were lost—lost by the cowardice. The work of a Church that is wearily done, in its life and extent, by a few living men and women in it, is poorly done; they do it with such a struggle; they are so weary and worn out; they have not pleasure, they have not enthusiasm, in doing it. How can they have? Oh, it is hard when a few men and women have to do all the teaching, and all the visiting, and all the work at the meetings! it spoils their work; it is not fair play. I appeal to you to determine whether I speak truly or not. One man cannot do another man's work. One link of a chain cannot do duty for another link, and if the one goes, sometimes the chain is worth nothing at all. The work of a dead or half-dead Church stands before God's judgment-seat unfulfilled. How can it tell on the careless? how can it tell on the worldly? Do you think that they will be just, and say, "Ah, look at what the fifty are doing"? No, you may be quite sure that they will look at the deficiency of the four hundred and fifty, and say, "Is this a Church of Christ?" Who blames them?

A living Church must work, and it must work on, and it must send life through every part and fragment of its whole frame, or else it has begun to die. It is not a small thing, of no concern, if some members of a Church are doing nothing by being idle. The work that a Church has to do is the creation of living Christian character, and of the conviction that being in Church on Sunday and belonging to a congregation make a man a kinder brother, or a more loving father or husband, and make a woman a better mother or a more kindly neighbour. That is the best work a Church can do, and that does not come to a man through a dead Church. A living Church must be making itself felt all around in the world outside by work of that kind; and I say that it is not a matter of no consequence if some members of a Church are not receiving and not transmitting that warmth and activity. It is not a small matter if one organ of my body be dying, be passing into mortification; it means death to the whole body, and I must cut it off unless life can be brought back again into it. It is the very law of life, as God has made it, that everything which has life in it must be working; it cannot stop. If your heart stops it is death; nothing else can make it stop but death. If any organ in your body is always receiving, but giving nothing, and not sending out what it gets, improved, to the rest, it means diseased life, it means death. Does the stomach receive its daily food to keep it to itself, as we so often receive the prayers and sermons in a Church? No; as soon as the feeding is done the hard work begins; the stomach gives it to the blood, and what does the blood do? As the great carrier of the system, it delivers it here and there—here a little to this muscle, there to that bone, there to the brain, and all through the body. And what the muscles and the other parts have received do they keep? No; if the various portions of the body did not give out what they receive they would get choked; it would be death by surfeit; they must work. And so the circle of life goes round; stop it at any one point, and you spoil the whole circle. If the blood-vessels do not do their work, if the muscles do not do their work, and so on throughout the entire system, it means this, that that body is not healthy; it means death to the whole frame. A business man said to me yesterday, "As soon as a man ceases pushing his business, and does not endeavour to extend it, it falls off." He does not want actually to increase it, but he must adopt that plan to keep it up to its present mark. The Church, alas! has not been willing to increase its work, desiring to take on other responsibilities; it does not say, "I cannot rest while people are cold and not interested in doing the Church's work, not bent upon bringing in sinners, and bringing children into the Sunday-schools to be taught to love and reverence religion, and causing people whose life is sour and bitter to be soothed and comforted."

What I have been pressing upon you is the law of life. Is it a hard law? No, it is a kind law. That is how God rewards you for what you have done; He gives you more work to do. In reading the parable of the men to whom it was assigned to rule over the cities did you ever mark how they were rewarded? Here is a man who has actively and effectively used ten talents. How does his lord reward him—by giving him a sinecure? No; he says, "You shall be ruler over ten cities;" and in the same way the man who has been successful with five talents is made ruler over five cities. Did you ever know a man who had served his country well, and benefited it, wish to withdraw into a drawing-room, and spend the remainder of his life in luxury and ease? Did you ever know a successful general who wanted to get a big fortune and to retire? No; successful men cannot be rewarded better than by giving them a deal more to do—larger responsibilities, larger powers, a larger sense of strength successfully exerted. That is the blessing and the joy which shall go with larger toil, and grander accomplishment, and brighter goodness. The few who are used to work shall have plenty of work. I take it as a sign that God is pleased with the results of a Church when He gives them new work to do, and the heart to take it up. It is not extra work; it is the reward of the past, and it is a step that shall lead you to a higher throne. Nay, more; work is indispensable to the enjoyment of a Church's good. No Church can heartily enjoy what we call religious privileges unless it is working hard; and no individual member of that Church will get the good of it unless he is taking a part in the Church's work. He does not need to be an office-bearer or anything of that sort; his work may be just friendliness to others in the house of God, showing a kind spirit to them or taking an interest in them, showing neighbourliness by his Church character. Do not think that it is a high array of talents that is required; no, it is the Church's function of being "all of one mind," and knit together and helping one another, and sympathising with one another, being bound up in the common lot of disasters and trials. I say that no individual member, unless he is taking his part, is a living member of that Church. If people are very fastidious about the doctrines which are preached, if people are searching into the sense of every hymn or prayer, if people are finding fault with the way in which everything is done, then it may be that the Church is to blame; but if the Church is doing its work as well as any poor human Church can do it, I advise such a one to say to himself, "May not I be to blame?" If you think that the daily food which is provided for you is not properly cooked, and it is not of the proper sort, and does not taste well, is it not your doctor you want to go to, to ask him to cure you of dyspepsia? And in all probability he will recommend to you exercise and hard work. A hard-working man does not complain even of dry bread; he is not particular; he has an appetite. I have known, in the Church to which I belonged before I began to preach, how pleased I was even with sermons which had no originality in them if I saw that they were part of the common work. It was my home, and you do not criticise your own home; and you do not criticise your father and mother; you believe in the power which you get from your father, because he is yours. Throw yourself into the Church, become a part of it, take an interest in everything, and it is wonderful how little you will have of criticism about you. Take plenty of spiritual exercise, and you may be sure that even a bare and poor spiritual diet will agree wonderfully with you.