God among men, and we are its citizens, bound by its
laws, loyal servants of the Great King, sworn to obey his commands
and enlarge his kingdom, and repel all the assaults of his
adversaries. Thus the Bible seems to me to depict the church of God.
But what if the army contains a multitude of men who will not obey
orders or submit to discipline? or if the city be overwhelmed with a
mass of aliens, who see in its laws and institutions mainly means of
selfish individual advantage? Responsibility, not privilege, is the
foundation of strong character in both men and institutions. There
was a good grain of truth in the old Scotch minister's remark, that
they had had a blessed work of grace in his church; they had not
taken anybody in, but a lot had gone out.

There are plenty of churches of Laodicea to-day. May you be
delivered from them. But, thank God, there are also churches of
Philadelphia and Smyrna. May you be pastors of one of the latter. It
will not pay you a very large salary, for Demas has gone to the
church of Laodicea, because the minister of the church of Smyrna was
not orthodox, or not sufficiently spiritually minded--meaning
thereby that he rebuked the sins of actual living men in general,
and of Demas in particular--or preached politics, and did not mind
his business. And your church may be small. For many of the
congregation have gone to the church around the other corner, which
is mainly a cluster of associations, having excellent names, and
useful for almost every purpose except building up a manly, rugged,
heroic, godlike character. The minister there, they will tell you,
preaches delightful sermons. They make you "feel so good." He
annihilates pantheism, and his denunciations of materialism are
eloquent in the extreme. But his incarnations of materialism are
Huxley and Darwin, and to the uncharitable he seems to almost
carefully avoid any language which might seem to reflect upon the
dollar- and place-worship of some of the occupants of his front
pews. Now, I am not here to defend Mr. Huxley or Mr. Darwin.
Withstand them to the face wherever they are to be blamed. And for
some utterances they are undoubtedly to be blamed, honest souls as
they were. But I for one cannot help feeling that there is among the
"dwellers in Jerusalem" a materialism of the heart which is
indefinitely worse than any intellectual heresy. When you hit at the
one heresy strike hard at the other also.

Many will have left your lit