condition of
membership in the Kingdom of God is well known; who fulfill this
condition and who do not, is not well known. And yet the moral test, in
spite of the difficulty of its applications, will always, and rightly,
be preferred by the world to the theological. Nevertheless, in spite of
the world's verdict, the parasite is content. He is "safe." Years ago
his mind worked through a certain chain of phrases in which the words
"believe" and "saved" were the conspicuous terms. And from that moment,
by all Scriptures, by all logic, and by all theology, his future was
guaranteed. He took out, in short, an insurance policy, by which he was
infallibly secured eternal life at death. This is not a matter to make
light of. We wish we were caricaturing instead of representing things as
they are. But we carry with us all who intimately know the spiritual
condition of the Narrow Church in asserting that in some cases at least
its members have nothing more to show for their religion than a formula,
a syllogism, a cant phrase or an experience of some kind which happened
long ago, and which men told them at the time was called Salvation. Need
we proceed to formulate objections to the parasitism of Evangelicism?
Between it and the Religion of the Church of Rome there is an affinity
as real as it is unsuspected. For one thing these religions are
spiritually disastrous as well as theologically erroneous in propagating
a false conception of Christianity. The fundamental idea alike of the
extreme Roman Catholic and extreme Evangelical Religions is Escape.
Man's chief end is to "get off." And all factors in religion, the
highest and most sacred, are degraded to this level. God, for example,
is a Great Lawyer. Or He is the Almighty Enemy; it is from Him we have
to "get off." Jesus Christ is the One who gets us off--a theological
figure who contrives so to adjust matters federally that the way is
clear. The Church in the one instance is a kind of conveyancing office
where the transaction is duly concluded, each party accepting the
others' terms; in the other case, a species of sheep-pen where the flock
awaits impatiently and indolently the final consummation. Generally, the
means are mistaken for the end, and the opening-up of the possibility of
spiritual growth becomes the signal to stop growing.

Second, these being cheap religions, are inevitably accompanied by a
cheap life. Safety being guaranteed from the first, there remains
nothing