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