The boy needs the church and the church needs the boy. Why is it that so many young men are on the downward road? Is it because they have either greater temptations or less power to resist them than others? Whether it be one or both, young men need the fellowship, protection and nurture of the church. My advice to every boy is, join the church.
—Alvin A. Cober.
Be a church member, my boy, because Christ commands it; because the church is on the winning side; because it is brave and manly; because to be a member of Christ’s church is the highest honor. Do not wait about it. Love Christ, confess Him by becoming one of His declared people. Besides this, what help there is in the companionship of the church.
CHAPTER XXV
Be a Church Member
There are in the United States about seven hundred different kinds of lodges, chapters and orders, but not one of them can take the place of the church, or do the work this institution was designed to do. The church is divine, all other organizations man’s creation. The latter are temporary, the former eternal.
Sometimes the word church is ill-defined. It is used to designate a sect or a place of worship. Instead of this, however, it is a people, and a redeemed people, though used in this connection with people and place. Jesus designated the church nucleus as those whom God had given Him out of the world. The first cabinet officers were illiterate fishermen who were taught at the feet of Jesus, a school infinitely more important than any college to-day. So true is this that every sceptical antagonist, whether possessed of the learning and genius of Voltaire, the brass and audacity of Paine, the polished eloquence of Hume, or the wealth and dignity of Bolingbroke, has had to bow before it and concede that it is all-powerful. And this, because its founder Jesus Christ is the center of attraction and the predominating influence.
WHY BOYS DO NOT GO.
Many boys absent themselves from church. Their excuses are without number and many of them without sense. Burdette, the Christian humorist, asks: “So you are not going to church this morning, my son? Ah, yes, I see. ‘The music is not good;’ that’s a pity! That’s what you go to church for, is it? And ‘the pews are not comfortable.’ That’s too bad! the Sabbath is a day of rest, and we go to church for repose. The less we do through the week, the more rest we clamor for on Sabbath. ‘The church is so far away; it is too far to walk, and I detest riding in a street-car, and they’re always crowded on the Sabbath.’ This is, indeed, distressing! Sometimes when I think how much farther away heaven is than the church, and that there are no conveyances on the road of any description, I wonder how some of us are going to get there. And ‘the sermon is so long always.’ All these things are, indeed, to be regretted! I would regret them more sincerely, my boy, did I not know that you will often squeeze into a stuffed street-car, with a hundred other men, breathing an odor of whisky, beer and tobacco, hang on a strap for two miles, and then pay fifty cents for the privilege of sitting on a rough plank in the broiling sun for two hours longer, while in the intervals of the game a scratch band will blow discordant thunder from a dozen misfit horns right into your ears, and come home to talk the rest of the family into a state of aural paralysis about the ‘dandiest’ game you ever saw played on that ground.”