true faith when he emphasizes just these two points in the faith
of Moses: "choosing to suffer affliction with the people of God," and
"enduring as seeing Him who is invisible," and God Himself through
Jesus Christ has accepted this partnership of His people in our
loyalty--"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
my brethren ye have done it unto me." I do not believe in the full
faith of any man who does not extend the loyalty he professes to
God to God's people as well, who does not feel as sensitive to his
brethren on earth as he does to his Father in heaven, who does not
practise piety toward the Church as he does toward her Head, or find
in her fellowship and her service a joy and a gladness which is one
with his deep joy in God, his Redeemer. Nay, is it not just in loving
people who are still imperfect, often disappointing, and far from
their ideal it may be, that in our relations to them we are to find
the greater proof and test of our religious faith? In these days such
a duty is unfortunately more complicated than with the psalmist. The
lines between God's Church and the world is not so clear as it was to
him, and the Church is divided into many and often hostile factions.
All the more it becomes the test of our religion if our hearts feel
and rejoice in the fellowship of God's simpler and more needy and more
devoted believers, however unattractive they may otherwise be.

Consider the way in which the psalmist reached this pure faith in God
and in His people. A factor in the process was distaste for the ugly
rites of idolatry--"Their drink-offerings of blood will I not offer."
Idolatry always develops a loathsome ritual. Sometimes it is cruel
and sometimes it is horribly unclean, but it always debases the
worshiper's mind, confuses his conscience, and hampers his freedom and
energy by the burdensome ceremonies it imposes upon them. Standing
afar off from them as we do, and knowing that there is no heathen
religion but has something good in it, we are apt to think that it
does not in the least matter how crude or how material a nation's
faith be if only it be faith in something more powerful than
themselves, if it satisfy their consciences and have some influence in
disciplining society and helping the individual to control himself.
But you have only to see idolatry at work, and at work with the
habits of ages upon it, to recognize how terrible it can be in its
identification of sheer filth a