There are two antagonist perils to which all evangelical Churches,
whether established or unendowed, are exposed in an age in which men's
minds are so stirred by the fluctuations of opinion, that though there
may not be much progress, there is at least much motion. They lie
open, on the one hand, to the danger of getting afloat on the tide of
innovation, and so drifting from the fixed position in which Churches,
as exponents of the mind of Christ, possess an authoritative voice,
into the giddy vortices of some revolving eddy of speculation, in
which they can at best assume but the character of mere advocates of
untried experiment; or, on the other hand, they are liable to fall
into the opposite mistake of obstinately resisting all change--however
excellent in itself, and however much a consequence of the onward
march of the species--and this not from any direct regard to those
divine laws, of which one jot or tittle cannot pass away, but simply
out of respect to certain peculiar views and opinions entertained by
their ancestors in ages considerably less wise than the times which
have succeeded them.

An evangelistic Church cannot fall into the one error without
losing its influential voice _as_ a Church. It may gain present
popularity by throwing itself upon what chances to be the onward
movement of the time; but it is a spendthrift popularity, that never
fails in the end to leave it exhausted and weak. The political
ague has always its cold as certainly as its hot fever fits: action
produces reaction; great exertion induces great fatigue; the
desired object, even when fully gained, is sure always, like all
mere sublunary objects of pursuit, to disappoint expectation; and
the Church that, forgetting where its real power lies, seeks,
Antaeus-like, to gather strength in this way from the earth,
contracts in every instance but the soil and weakness inherent in
those earthy and unspiritual things to which it attaches itself. It,
too, comes to have its cold ague fits and its reaction--periods of
exhaustion, disappointment, and decline. And the opposite error of
clinging to the worn-out and the obsolete produces ultimately the
same effect, though it operates in a different way. A Church that,
in behalf of some antiquated type of thought or action, opposes
itself to what is in reality the onward current of the age, is sure
always to fare like stranded ice-floes, that, in a river flooded
by thaw, retain the exact temperature