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YOU AND YOUR CHURCH 
 

 
YOU AND YOUR 
 CHURCH 
 
 By 
 JAMES S. KIRTLEY, D. D. 
 
 Author of 
 
 “That Boy of Yours,”’ “ That Young Man and Himeelf,”’ 
 ‘* Twenty-six Days with Jesus” 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 THE JUDSON PRESS 
 
 BOSTON CHICAGO LOS ANGELES 
 
 KANSAS CITY SEATTLE TORONTO 
 
 GRNRY OF PRINCETG 
 YY. 
 
 MAR 2 1999 
 aS 
 Pine, pe ar Aes 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright, 1920, by 
 GILBERT N. BRINK, Sscrerary 
 
 Copyright, 1926, by 
 THE JUDSON PRESS 
 
 
 
 Published, November, 1920 
 Reissued, March, 1926 
 
 PRINTED IN U,S. A. 
 
DEDICATED 
 TO 
 MY CHILDREN 
 
 George, Adelaide, Bess 
 

 
FOREWORD 
 
 I HAVE embodied in these fifteen chapters much 
 of what I have said to members of the church in 
 personal conversations, in brief talks, and in more 
 elaborate addresses. Many good brethren have 
 urged me to put it all in book form and several 
 Assemblies, Associations, Conferences, and Con- 
 ventions have taken formal action requesting the 
 publication of several of the addresses, especially 
 the ones on the Baptist Distinctive and the Bap- 
 tist Objective. The two last mentioned have been 
 reconstructed and elaborated for this volume. 
 It would be useless to take the space at this 
 point to state the many and very vital reasons 
 why every member of our churches should grasp 
 all the principles, ideals, and practices of the faith 
 just at this stage of the world’s history. What 
 is involved in being a Christian, what is involved 
 in being a church-member, what is involved in 
 being a Baptist—these are questions of para- 
 mount concern. ‘The greatest triumphs in the 
 history of Christianity are triumphs in which 
 Baptists have participated as no other body of 
 
Foreword 
 
 
 
 Christians has; but far greater triumphs await us 
 if we are as wise in the coming day and genera- 
 tion as we have been in the past. 
 
 I have what seems a reasonable hope, that many 
 members of our churches in the United States 
 and Canada will read this effort to answer the 
 questions mentioned above, and that many pas- 
 tors and other leaders will find it a suitable text- 
 book for classes in the study of these essentials 
 in the religion of today and of the coming day. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 1PM RAD SL 
 paid a A CHURCH-MEMBER spied 
 I. BECOMING A CHRISTIAN ........... B 
 PI OINING) THE) CHURCH ING s... esse creer: II 
 PART II 
 Wuat You FOUND IN THE CHURCH 
 PeANOTHER | GEREMONY i. estercielc nici tines 29 
 IT. A BroTHERHOOD ....... Subeeedes 36 
 DLN SO RGANISM As cao atyeha: Miley an Loe 42 
 IV. AccUMULATED TREASURES ......... 52 
 Wee EO DAPTIST: DISTINCTIVEY ..cuiasiste are 56 
 ViEsbae DAPTIST| OBJECTIVE 22002 0)05% 96 
 VII. INSTRUMENTALITIES AND AGENCIES .. 123 
 
 PART OUT 
 
 Your PART 
 PEMA TRY OUPARE,.TOSLIO) Saye tee. tiaie Rae 
 
 . THE POWERS WITH Wuicu You 
 
 NG) RR a pe Dies i de UY Sheer 139 
 THE POWER FROM ABOVE. TEE Hea 150 
 MILOWETO. GEToTHATIPOWER) occa eis c 155 
 . SOME THINGS THAT HELP ......... 169 
 
 . DIFFICULTIES AND ENCOURAGEMENTS. 176 
 
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PART I 
 
 A CHURCH-MEMBER 
 

 
I 
 BECOMING A CHRISTIAN 
 
 You are now a Christian, a follower of Christ; 
 but you were not always so. You were born in- 
 nocent of any sin, but with inherent possibilities 
 of sinning and with inherent possibilities of be- 
 coming a Christian. And you became a Christian. 
 
 1. How? 
 
 1. It came about in the same way in which all 
 the millions of Christians of the present and of 
 the past became such: through a personal choice 
 of Christ, made by yourself and for yourself, not 
 made by some one else for you, but by you alone. 
 Others may have chosen him for you and urged 
 him upon you, may have helped you to under- 
 stand, resolve, and act, but not till you chose him 
 for yourself did you become a Christian. 
 
 Perhaps you had special help from the home. 
 You may have been brought up so well, with 
 Christ so dominant over the thoughts and ideals 
 and interests and atmosphere of the home, that 
 you fell under his influence without resistance or 
 effort or hesitation or fear. You fell in with the 
 ways of the home-makers as if they were your 
 own from the beginning. Almost unconsciously 
 you adopted their habits. You took over their 
 religion by the instinct of imitation with which 
 
 [3] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 you had been endowed by nature. But there 
 came a time when you felt that Christ must be 
 the direct source of your own life as well as of 
 theirs, and you made him your Saviour and Mas- 
 ter as he was theirs, by the same sort of choice 
 that they had once made. Then you began to 
 form your own habits apart from theirs, dealing 
 personally and directly with God through Christ, 
 though still under the influence of those to whom 
 you owed so much and still full of appreciation 
 of them. You had felt your own need of him. 
 There was no radical change in your life because 
 there was so little to be changed. Your habits 
 were right, there had been no development of any 
 bad possibilities within you; but now Christ was 
 at the center, and you would grow like him in- 
 stead of growing like your parents. You have 
 made this choice so early in life that you can say, 
 as I have heard so many say, that you cannot re- | 
 member the time when you were not a Christian. 
 Perhaps young Timothy is a case in point. (Acts 
 16 : 1-3.) Your sense of sinfulness was not so 
 acute at the first as it has since grown, for you 
 will be discovering all the time how weak and 
 liable you are to commit sin, sin of the thought 
 or imagination or feeling or act. 
 
 On the other hand, you may have grown up in 
 an environment in which you were not made to 
 think of Christ in a personal way, and you grew 
 in the wrong direction, whether you went into a 
 life of much sinning or not, and, when the sense 
 of need seized you, it was a very pungent sense 
 
 Tua 
 
Becoming a Christian 
 
 
 
 of sinfulness and lostness. You recall the struggle 
 you had with yourself before you could yield 
 your will to his, or the way you groped about 
 searching for him, crying to him to have mercy 
 on you, when you did not know that his heart 
 was even then overflowing with mercy and that 
 he was trying to get your attention centered on 
 his mercy and his strength so that he could save 
 you. Youcan never tell how glad you were when 
 you looked and lived and felt the sense of pardon 
 and cleansing. You experienced what is told in 
 John 3: 14-18. 
 
 Or, possibly you are one of those who have 
 gone deeply into sin, and you had an awakening 
 which threw you into agony till at last Jesus 
 spoke to your troubled soul, as he spoke to the 
 waves of the sea, and said, ‘‘ Peace, be still.” It 
 was like going from a cemetery into a banquet 
 hall, from Cimmerian darkness into'a land of 
 rainbows. It had some elements like the ex- 
 perience of Saul of Tarsus (Acts 9) or of the 
 Philippian jailer. (Acts 16 : 19-34.) 
 
 You may even have gone so far as to commit 
 some sin which humanity pronounces incurable, 
 a sin with which only the stern laws of man can 
 deal. There are many people in trouble to whom 
 there is absolutely no way out but through the 
 door of Christ’s forgiving and cleansing and in- 
 spiring heart, and the laws of nature and of man 
 must simply take their course. Such are the 
 libertine, the murderer, the dope-fiend, the thief. 
 I have in mind some men and even women who 
 
 [5] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 were blackened by the most revolting sins and © 
 even crimes, who are now rejoicing in a Saviour’s 
 redeeming work. The scars will mark them for- 
 ever, but they will also mark them as brands 
 snatched from the burning. Take the case of 
 the robber crucified with Jesus. (Luke 23 : 39- 
 43.) Take the case of some eminent workers 
 all over the country. Read again Paul’s list of 
 the signs of depravity in 1 Corinthians, chapter 
 6, and hear him say: “ And such were some of 
 you; but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, 
 but ye were justified in the name of the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God.” 
 
 The point is that, whichever class you belonged 
 to, you became a Christian in the same way that 
 every other one followed, and that was by a 
 choice of Christ which brought him with his 
 transforming and directing grace into your heart. 
 You made the choice, whether quietly, as did 
 Lydia and the Ethiopian treasurer and millions 
 more, or amid upheaval and agony, as did Saul 
 and the jailer and millions of others. 
 
 2. Yet you became a Christian in a way dif- 
 ferent from that of any other one that ever lived, 
 for the simple reason that you are different from 
 anybody else in the world, different from any one 
 that ever did or ever will live, different in tem- 
 perament, training, outlook, stage of experience, 
 ways of feeling, thinking, and doing. Sometimes 
 inquirers think they must become Christians just 
 as other Christians say they did, even to the very 
 circumstances and all the emotions. My own 
 
 [6] 
 
Becoming a Christian 
 
 conversion at the age of sixteen was very vivid, 
 with intense sense of need and with great joy 
 when at last I apprehended Christ as my loving 
 Saviour. A cousin of mine made the choice so 
 early that she was not at all aware, at the time, of 
 the vast significance of that choice, not aware of 
 much difference after her acceptance of Christ. 
 But the new life began at that point. 
 
 Then let me say again, that the two essentials 
 in your becoming a Christian are, first, a sense 
 of need, and, secondly, a reliance on Christ as 
 Saviour, Teacher, Master, Guide, Friend; not 
 trust for salvation in parents or teacher or minis- 
 ter or church, though you did not lack confidence 
 in them, but confidence in Christ to do for you 
 and with you what none of the others nor all 
 combined could do. When you took him as your 
 Saviour it was through that action of the soul 
 which we call faith, trust, confidence, belief, and 
 we sometimes illustrate it by the physical senses 
 of touch, sight, taste, and the like. The sense 
 of need we call conviction; the change of attitude 
 toward sin we call repentance; the turning to him 
 with reliance we call faith—all just as simple as 
 it could be. 
 
 Your conversion was just like all others in the 
 essentials, but unlike all others just as you are 
 unlike other people. 
 
 2. Agencies 
 Perhaps I should say the “instruments and 
 agencies’ that led you to make that choice. It 
 
 [7] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 is important to go over them for reasons that 
 must be at once quite obvious. It will guide 
 you in your attitude toward those agencies, and 
 it will enable you to employ them in the interest 
 of others. 
 
 Perhaps it was example, the example of some 
 one who made you feel that you must be just 
 such a Christian as that person, and you saw 
 clearly that Jesus was the source of his life and 
 must become the source of your goodness. 
 
 Or it may be that some one who knew your 
 need made a distinct and purposed appeal to you 
 that God used in awakening in you a sense of 
 that need, till you saw that you were “ without 
 hope and without God in the world.” 
 
 Or it may have come simply from reading 
 some awakening passage of the Bible that gripped 
 you and held you till you could yield to Christ. 
 (Such as John 3 : 16;Matt. 11 > 28-203; Actes 
 L7. 3.30, 3. Rom 5 eli 27Cotnwiy aah ow 
 
 Perhaps it was a sermon you heard, like the 
 words which reached Tom Nowell’s ears from 
 the old sailors’ chaplain, whom he had heard 
 many a time, and had scorned, but now stopped 
 and listened to him for a moment as he was speak- 
 ing on the street corner in Seattle and telling the 
 delinquents before him that if they would kneel 
 down and honestly ask God to do what was 
 possible for them, there was hope for every one 
 of them. Tom reached a sudden determination 
 and, hastening back to the opium-joint in which 
 he had been lying for days in a cocaine stupor, 
 
 [8] 
 
Becoming a Christian 
 
 he kneeled down and put himself in God’s hands 
 and rose a new man. 
 
 It may have been the thought of another’s 
 doom, as was the case with Adoniram Judson. 
 He had graduated at Brown University, but he 
 was not a Christian. He was traveling through 
 the country, and stopped for the night at an inn. 
 During the night he heard the moaning of a sick 
 man in an adjoining room and, on inquiring, 
 learned that it was an old University friend of 
 his who was dying. Judson exclaimed, ‘“ Dying 
 and lost!’ That was the thought which awak- 
 ened him and led him to seek his Saviour. 
 
 Or there may have been some special view of 
 the Christ whose heart was made to suffer be- 
 cause of your sins, as Saul of Tarsus caught a 
 vision of Christ and heard him say, “ Why per- 
 secutest thou me?”’ 
 
 But whatever the means by which it was done, 
 your acceptance of Christ was brought about 
 by the Spirit of God, who used the means to 
 gain your attention and fix it on Christ, “the 
 Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the 
 world,” just as he is now using you and your 
 efforts and your influence to get the attention of 
 others who need Christ as you did. It is the 
 Spirit who convicted you of sins. (John 16 : 8- 
 11.) It is he who gave you rebirth in Christ. 
 
 Now you are a Christian, leading the most 
 blessed life ever known or dreamed of, whether 
 you are aware of all its blessedness or not, 
 whether you are realizing all of its possibilities 
 
 [9] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 or not. Here are some passages of Scripture 
 which tell you some important things about the 
 life you are living: Matthew 5 :: 3-11; 13; 
 Romans 4 : 6-8; 2 Corinthians 4: 6; 1 John 5: 
 2; Revelation 21 to 22; Proverbs 4 : 18, 19. 
 
 [10] 
 
II 
 JOINING THE CHURCH 
 
 I. Wuy You Di It 
 
 There was just one reason: you chose to do so. 
 You had help in making that choice, but no one 
 compelled you to make it. 
 
 There are three reasons why you made the 
 choice: 
 
 1. You Wanted To 
 
 Something within you prompted you. The 
 very thing you wanted to do was to join the 
 church. Even if no one had suggested it, you 
 would have thought of it yourself, and if there 
 had been no church to join, you would have won- 
 dered why there was not and would have been 
 inclined to originate something of the sort your- 
 self. 
 
 (1) It was an instinct of the new Christian 
 nature to want to be associated with the rest of 
 the followers of Christ because they and you 
 were alike, had passed through the same experi- 
 ence, had the same interests, sustained the same 
 relation to Christ. You were born into the house- 
 hold of faith when you were born again. “ Birds 
 of a feather flock together ’—it was something 
 like that. 
 
 [ 11 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 ba ere al 
 
 (2) There was a new tie binding you to them, 
 the ligament of life, the new life in Christ. You 
 felt the pull of it and have been feeling it ever 
 since. It worked, whether you were conscious 
 of it or not, whether you were working or rest- 
 ing or eating or thinking. 
 
 (3) There was born a new ambition in your 
 soul, the ambition to impart what you had, even 
 your innermost experience, an instinct to share 
 all that you had, to pass it on as designed for 
 others all the more because it had blessed you, 
 as Paul wrote to the Romans, “ I long to see you, 
 that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift ” 
 (Rom. 1: 11). That ambition was correlated 
 to that which became the new law of your life, 
 the law of service. 
 
 (4) You found a new motive in your heart, 
 the motive of love. Love always corresponds to 
 relationships, and there is a love exactly suited to — 
 any relationship into which you were born or 
 may establish yourself. There is never any con- 
 flict between the different kinds of love when 
 the relationships. are rightly established and 
 maintained; in fact, they intensify each other. 
 You love your father all the more for loving 
 your husband or wife or child or brother or 
 sister or neighbor. 
 
 But here is a new variety of love, the love of 
 Christians for each other, just as the love of 
 brothers and sisters and all the rest is rudimen- 
 tary in us when we are born into this life. This 
 love is born in us when we are “ born again.” 
 
 [12] 
 
¢ 
 
 Joining the Church 
 
 Of course, it must be cultivated and will suffer 
 from neglect, but it is there at the start of the 
 Christian life. It is called “ love of the brethren,” 
 “brotherly love,’ and ‘“ Christian love.” In ac- 
 cepting Christ you accepted all whom he had 
 accepted. In coming into your heart he brought 
 in all his friends with him. He brought that 
 new love from heaven with him, and he trans- 
 plants it into our hearts. A new variety of car- 
 nation was produced some years ago and a rich 
 man in the East is said to have paid thirty thou- 
 sand dollars for it. This new love added to all 
 the other varieties is priceless. Paul speaks of it 
 when he writes to the Thessalonians: ‘ For, as 
 
 concerning love of the brethren, ye have no need 
 
 that one write unto you; for ye yourselves are 
 taught of God to love one another” (1 Thess. 
 4:9). Asa suitable love for the natural brother 
 is born in you, so this love for the Christian 
 brother is implanted in you when you are born 
 again. It prompted you to join the church where 
 the others were. 
 
 (5) Gratitude also prompted you to seek the 
 church and Christian people. It was through 
 them you had been brought to Christ—through 
 the work and worship and efforts of their church, 
 their prayers for you, their influence over you, 
 their instructions. You felt that the church as 
 a whole, as well as definite individuals, had had 
 some part in leading you to the great decision. 
 You wanted to show your gratitude by telling 
 them so, by being with them, by doing something 
 
 [ 13 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 for them, and by helping them do for others 
 what they had done for you. 
 
 (6) Self-interest of an unselfish sort led you 
 to seek the church. You felt your need of other 
 Christians. Their fellowship and friendship 
 would strengthen and safeguard you; your heart 
 would find rest among them; your judgment 
 would be confirmed in its convictions by them; 
 your spiritual needs required a home and a home 
 love—a thing you felt very keenly, even before 
 you tried to understand the full meaning of the 
 hunger you had for this company and companion- 
 ship. 
 
 Some of the members did not attract you by 
 their natural gifts or their attainments; but there 
 was one respect in which they all seemed attrac- 
 tive: they all belonged to Christ, they represented 
 Christ, even though they may not have done so 
 with satisfaction to you or to themselves. 
 
 2. The People in the Church Wanted You to Join 
 
 (1) They had the same interest in you that 
 you had in them. They wanted you with them 
 as much as you wanted to be with them. 
 
 (2) You were, in a true sense, the child of the 
 church, and they had that sort of love for you. 
 They wanted to do still more for you, and they 
 knew they could not do very much for you while 
 you were on the outside. 
 
 (3) They knew from experience what you 
 needed and knew far better than you did what 
 you would lose if you failed to join them. 
 
 [14] 
 
Joining the Church 
 
 (4) They had a desire for self-preservation, 
 which increased their desire to have you come in, 
 for they knew that, if those whom they led to 
 Christ did not join, the church would soon cease 
 to exist, and there would be no more cooperative 
 effort for the salvation of others from sins. 
 
 (5) They needed you and knew it, felt it, 
 needed you to help them win others to Christ. It 
 is a delight to them to have new coworkers in 
 that blessed enterprise. 
 
 (6) The bond that bound them to you, the 
 bond of the new life in Christ, was felt just as 
 keenly by them as by you; the law of the new 
 life in Christ, the law of service, is the law under 
 which they think of you and they would serve 
 you; the motive of the new life, the motive of 
 love, is one they feel keenly and constantly. The 
 -church would atmosphere and motivate your life. 
 
 3. Christ Wanted You to Join 
 
 (1) He knew that your nature required that 
 you get into the group with the rest of the dis- 
 ciples. He knew that, with your inclination to 
 get with them and their inclination to have you 
 with them, there would be a getting together any- 
 how and that, unless he took charge of it, there 
 would be serious blunders. He arranged for it in 
 the very best possible way. 
 
 (2) He knew how important it 1s that you 
 confess him, and he planned it so that you could 
 do so in the most effective manner. There is a 
 value in confessing him. He knew all about that, 
 
 [15] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 and he would not let you miss it. In confessing 
 him you had your experience of him made more 
 vivid and enduring, you brightened the experi- 
 ences of others, and you made a direct appeal to 
 those who were not then Christians. It tested 
 your fidelity to him and was your testimony to 
 his power. It gratified Christ and made it pos- 
 sible for him to confess you in the presence of 
 his Father and the holy angels. (Matt. 10: 
 32, 33-) . 
 
 (3) He knew how important it was that you 
 be properly classified. ‘There is a chapter in 
 Drummond’s “ Natural Law in the Spiritual 
 World” on the subject of the significance of 
 classification that everybody should read. In be- 
 ing classified with your own people, you are re- 
 enforced with what they have, you are protected 
 with their strength, you are at once a preacher, ~ 
 using their voice. Confession crystallizes the 
 sentiments; classification with other Christians 
 socializes them. 
 
 (4) He wanted to see you cared for. Not till 
 children may grow up just as well outside as 
 inside the family and the home will it ever be 
 possible for Christians to be just as good outside 
 the church as inside. Flowers may grow along 
 the roadside and still be flowers, but they do a 
 great deal better in a well-cultivated garden. No 
 one wants to ask the question whether he can 
 live a Christian life without confessing Christ 
 and becoming classified with his people, but you 
 simply ask, What does Christ think about it and 
 
 [ 16 | 
 
Joining the Church 
 
 what does he wish? There is a sense in which 
 the church is a home and a school and a hospital, 
 but the purpose is to make home-makers and 
 teachers and soldiers out of those who enter. 
 
 (5) He wanted you to be made one with the 
 others, socialized, brigaded with them, to use one 
 of our military terms. He is building a body 
 out of the total of his disciples. There are three 
 striking symbols of that body. One is the human 
 body. He is the head, and we are the members. 
 The head does the thinking and directs the ac- 
 tivities of the body, using the members as it will, 
 but it depends on the body to execute its thoughts 
 and plans. Another figure is that of the vine 
 and its branches. The vine is the source of life 
 and fruitfulness to the branches, all the vitality 
 and all the material for leaves and fruit coming 
 up from the roots through the trunk line; but the 
 vine is dependent on the branches to manifest that 
 life and bear the fruit. A third impressive figure 
 is that of a building and its foundation or corner- 
 stone. Christ is the foundation of faith and life, 
 “and other foundation can no man lay,” but the 
 stones laid on it are similar to it, are “living 
 stones,’ and all together they “ grow into a liv- 
 ing temple,” “a spiritual house.” 
 
 In thus unifying you with others he has done 
 these two things for you: (a) he has been indi- 
 vidualizing you, has made you more yourself 
 than if you had been allowed to “ run wild” out 
 in the world. A hand is not less a hand because 
 it is a part of the whole body, but rather is made 
 
 [17] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 more distinctive by being one of many members 
 of the same body. Its functions have been set 
 off against those of the foot and the ear and the 
 eye. If there were no foot the hand would try 
 to be a foot too, and that is never a very suc- 
 cessful way of utilizing the hand. Your own 
 traits and activities are delimited by association 
 with others, and your individuality is developed 
 as it could not be if you were alone. 
 
 (b) He has been socializing you. That is, he 
 makes you part of the body. It is a hand work- 
 ing with foot and ear and eye and nose. The 
 result is that he reenforces you with all the other 
 members and reenforces them with you. The 
 strength of the hand is imparted to all the other 
 members either in its structural relations with 
 them or in the ministry it seeks to render to them. 
 Responsibilities make you both more yourself . 
 and more theirs. 
 
 As a result of that socialization your life func- 
 tions in new ways, achieves new products. One 
 function is that of united prayer. Jesus knew 
 what was possible in that line, for he says: “ If 
 two of you shall agree on earth as touching any- 
 thing which they shall ask, it shall be done for 
 them by my Father who is in heaven. For 
 where two or three are gathered together in my 
 name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 
 18: 19, 20). In Acts 2 and 3 we see how this 
 common and persistent prayer together preceded 
 and prepared for the coming of the Spirit on the 
 Day of Pentecost. 
 
 [ 18 | 
 
Joining the Church 
 
 Worship becomes a new thing, a composite of 
 the adoration of many souls. Your walk with 
 them is a march, a drill, a social advance upward. 
 Your work is your own part of the common task 
 that blends the spirits of the workers in the prod- 
 uct. It is a united attack on sin and a united 
 building of the structure of society. You de- 
 velop the possibilities of a nature that has the 
 multitudinous element in it. 
 
 The result within you is the development of the 
 three great elemental Christian impulses, love of 
 the brethren, obedience to Christ, and the spirit 
 of serving. 
 
 The method by which he had you make that 
 confession was in itself designed by him to pre- 
 serve the experiences of the soul and proclaim 
 them, thereby intensifying and imparting them. 
 Of course there was a ceremony. We are so 
 constituted that some sort of formula is needed 
 as a means of symbolizing something and com- 
 mitting us to something. The greatest event in 
 the history of the world was the death and resur- 
 rection of Jesus; the greatest experience you 
 ever had was your experience in choosing him 
 as your Saviour and Teacher and Master, and 
 thereby dying to the past and rising to the future; 
 the greatest hope you cherish for the future is 
 that of the resurrection of the body. Well, Jesus 
 put all three of these into a symbol that met you 
 at the door of the church. The purpose of bap- 
 tism was to set forth in a symbol those three ex- 
 periences of resurrection. Jesus was wondrously 
 
 [19 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 wise in arranging it so. You preached the gospel, 
 saying in a living tableau, ‘‘ This is what saved 
 me, the death and resurrection of Christ.” You 
 told your experience in the same way, as you 
 said, without a spoken word, “ This is how it 
 saved me, by my death to the past with its sins 
 and my resurrection to the future with its sal- 
 vation.”’ You also proclaimed your hope of a 
 future resurrection of the body in that same way. 
 (Rom. 6 : 3-5.) 
 
 Jesus arranged all of that with a view to giving 
 you pleasure, impressing all who saw it that he 
 died for our sins and rose for our justification, 
 and that we may die to sin and rise to a new life. 
 So we see that the ceremony at the church door 
 did not destroy anything that was in your ex- 
 perience, but expressed and confirmed and en- 
 larged it all. . 
 
 We can imagine his joy in seeing you confess 
 him. 
 
 II.. How You JoINnep 
 
 You will recall three things: 
 
 1. Your Confession 
 
 It was your confession, not of yourself, but 
 of your Saviour; not of your goodness, but of 
 his; not of your faith, but of the Saviour in 
 whom your faith rested; not of your purposes, 
 but of the Saviour whom you purposed to love 
 and trust and serve. You confessed him as a 
 Saviour whom you actually trusted for salvation, 
 
 [ 20 ] 
 
Joining the Church 
 
 for teaching, for guidance. You became a Chris- 
 tian when you made the inner decision to accept 
 Christ. The will acted on the matter. That 
 settled it. Then you confessed Christ. 
 
 You may have had much emotion and you may 
 have had very little. That is a matter of tem- 
 perament, or experience, or circumstances, or all 
 combined. Many people take that decision 
 quietly, like Lydia, “whose heart the Lord 
 opened, that she attended unto the things which 
 were spoken by Paul” (Acts 16 : 14)—whose 
 heart the Lord opened like a flower as the sun 
 calls it to awake—or like the Ethiopian treasurer 
 who leaned upon Jesus and took his hand and 
 was saved. Others are awakened with a storm of 
 sorrow, like the jailer at Philippi (Acts 16), or 
 like Paul himself on that mad, wild ride to 
 Damascus. (Acts 9. ) 
 
 All you needed in joining the church was to 
 give evidence that you had actually accepted 
 Christ and intended to live as his follower—just 
 that, nothing more. The rest would come in the 
 path of duty and service. You did not join the 
 church to become a Christian, but to lead a Chris- 
 tian life. It was not through the church to 
 Christ, but through Christ into the church, 
 
 2. Your Acceptance by the Church for Member- 
 ship 
 In some churches they ask candidates for mem- 
 
 bership to meet the deacons, or a standing com- 
 mittee, who make some private investigation and 
 
 [21] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 then bring the case before the church in a public 
 way. In other churches the habit is to invite the 
 candidate to come before the whole church in the 
 first instance and make the statement in public. 
 The vote of the church settles the matter, in 
 either case. 
 
 3. Your Baptism 
 
 In your careless days you may have thought 
 of baptism as a singular, almost grotesque thing, 
 about which people could make humorous re- 
 marks quite easily. But, when you came to be 
 baptized, it was a most unique experience. It 
 did not save you or give you the consciousness of 
 being a Christian—it could not; but it did give 
 you the consciousness of having done your Mas- 
 ter’s will so far. It told in a living tableau what 
 did save you and how it saved you and what you. 
 hoped for in the future. Jesus was wonderfully 
 wise in giving us only two ordinances and in put- 
 ting into those ordinances as in a mold the whole 
 content of the gospel. 
 
 At this point it may be well to say something 
 about the form of baptism. I have taken its 
 real form for granted in all my allusions to it up 
 to this point and, in the chapter on The Great 
 Distinctive, I give the historical story of the way 
 the form came to be changed. 
 
 If you were asked, What is the form of bap- 
 tism? you could answer that there is only one 
 way to find out: Go to the dictionary as you 
 would in looking up any other word. In this 
 
 [ 22 ] 
 
| Joining the Church 
 
 
 
 case you would have to go to the Greek diction- 
 ary, as the words “ baptize’ and “ baptism ”’ are 
 not English words. They were baptizo and bap- 
 tisma in Greek, one the verb telling the doing, 
 and the other the noun telling what is done. 
 These words were not translated into our lan- 
 guage, they were only transferred and their final 
 syllables adapted to our language. When we 
 go, then, to the various Greek dictionaries, or 
 lexicons, as they are called, we find that the 
 twenty odd dictionaries are perfectly agreed in 
 saying that the verb baptize means to dip, to 
 plunge, to overwhelm, to immerse. They also say 
 that there is a distinct verb for sprinkle, rantizo; 
 also one for pour, ekcheo; and that their meanings 
 are always separate. For this ordinance which 
 we call baptism, of course there is only the one 
 word used. That is the reason we always say 
 baptism. If the word for sprinking, or pouring, 
 was ever used when reference was made to the 
 ordinance, we could not take it over into our lan- 
 guage by the term baptism, but would have to say 
 rantism or use the word for pour. 
 
 That strictly settles the matter. But there are 
 several subsidiary ways of confirming the find- 
 ings of the dictionaries. 
 
 In support of the meaning of the words bap- 
 tizo and baptisma—“ baptize’ and “ baptism,” as 
 we say in English—you have only to note the 
 circumstances connected with the administration 
 of the ordinance. John was baptizing, and the 
 people came to him, and “ they were baptized by 
 
 [ 23 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 him in the river Jordan” (Matt. 3: 6). “ Jesus 
 came from Nazareth, and was baptized of John 
 in the Jordan. And straightway coming up out 
 of the ‘water’ (Mark 1 <0, 10). > Andwiomm 
 also was baptizing in Atnon, near to Salim, be- 
 cause there was much water there” (John 3: 
 23). The Ethiopian treasurer “ went down into 
 the water”? and “came up out of the water” 
 (Acts Si sous): 
 
 Another confirmation is found in the signifi- 
 cance of the ordinance itself asa symbol. I have 
 already spoken of what it was given for and its 
 symbolic character. Read Romans 6 : 3-5 about 
 being “ buried with him by baptism into death.”’ 
 
 In his “ Spirit of Christianity ’’ Hegel thus re- 
 fers to baptism: “ John’s custom of immersing 
 his disciples in water was an important symbol. 
 
 There is no feeling so homogeneous to the desire © 
 
 for the infinite as the desire to be buried in water. 
 The one who plunges in faces a foreign element 
 that at once completely surrounds him and makes 
 itself felt at every point of his body. He has 
 only felt water, that touches him where he is, and 
 he is only where he feels it. There is no hole in 
 
 the water, no limitation, no variety or definite-— 
 
 ness. The feeling of it is the most unscattered 
 and simple. The immersed person comes out into 
 the light, separates himself from the water, is 
 divided from it and yet drips from it all around. 
 As it leaves him the world takes on form again, 
 and he steps back strengthened into the manifold 
 state of consciousness again. While he was im- 
 
 [ 24 | 
 
Joining the Church 
 
 
 
 mersed he had but one feeling ; the world was for- 
 gotten, and he was in a solitude that had cast 
 everything away, unwound itself from every- 
 thing. Baptism was a getting out of the past, and 
 an enthusiastic consecration to a new world.” 
 
 Still another is the practice of the early Chris- 
 tians and the curious way in which sprinkling 
 and pouring came to be adopted as substitutes. 
 A full account of that is given in the chapter on 
 The Great Distinctive. Ancient art preserves the 
 evidence in the old baptisteries. 
 
 While these several confirmations of the real 
 form of baptism are interesting and pleasing, 
 they are really not required. The meaning of the 
 word is established by the dictionaries so fully 
 that no competent scholar claims that sprinkling 
 and pouring are anything but substitutes for real 
 baptism, though many seek to justify the con- 
 tinued use of the substitutes. The grounds on 
 which they do so are wholly at variance with 
 true reasoning and, if the matter were not so seri- 
 ous, they would often be ludicrous in the extreme. 
 
 [25 ] 
 

 
PART II 
 
 WHAT YOU FOUND IN THE 
 CHURCH 
 
Ae ou an 
 om z) rads ie 
 
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 vf 
 
 
 
I 
 ANOTHER CEREMONY 
 
 THE Lorp’s SUPPER 
 
 1. What It Is 
 
 It is a supper of bread and wine, to be eaten 
 by the disciples at intervals. It is not a full meal 
 or an effort to gratify hunger and thirst. In fact, 
 it is not needed for physical strength or refresh- 
 ing, but for the good of the soul. A pinch of 
 the bread and a sip of the wine are enough. 
 
 2. What It Means 
 
 Bread stands as the type of all kinds of food, 
 and the juice of the grape is representative of 
 all invigorating beverages. The two, then, are 
 symbols of what sustains the soul. The real Sus- 
 tainer of the soul is Christ. Long before he es- 
 tablished the ordinance he told the people that. 
 He said: “ I am the bread which came down out 
 of heaven”; “I am the bread of life”; “ your 
 fathers ate manna in the wilderness and died. 
 This is the bread which cometh down out of 
 heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. 
 I am the living bread which came down out of 
 heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall 
 live forever” (John 6: 41-51). He is also the 
 
 [ 29 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 living water. To the woman at the well he said, 
 “Tf thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is 
 that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou 
 wouldest have asked of him, and he would have 
 given thee living water” (John 4: 10). “If 
 any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink ” 
 (John 7 : 37). The bread and the wine are the 
 two symbols of his life, and together they give 
 the complete idea of him as the one source and 
 sustenance of our life. As we partake of them 
 in a physical way, so we partake of him in a 
 spiritual way. 
 
 But the bread must be broken and the wine 
 poured out before they can be taken into the sys- 
 tem. So his body has been broken by the ham- 
 mer of hate and his veins have been opened that 
 his life might be given up as well as given out for 
 us, then given to us, then reproduced in us. 
 
 There is a close connection between these two 
 ceremonies, baptism and the Supper. The two 
 complete one great idea. Baptism symbolizes the 
 emergence of the soul into new life in Christ; 
 the Supper symbolizes the feeding of that new 
 life on him, the “ hidden manna,” the “ bread 
 of heaven.” As birth takes place only once and 
 is followed by frequently taking what nourishes 
 life, so baptism comes once for all, while the 
 Supper comes at intervals to signify that the life 
 must be constantly nourished. “ As oft as ye eat 
 this bread, and drink this cup, ye do show forth 
 the Lord’s death till he come.’’ We shall keep it 
 up “ till he comes.” 
 
 [ 30 ] 
 
Another Ceremony 
 
 3. How Observe It 
 
 Paul says we must do it “worthily.”’ That 
 floes not raise the question of whether you are 
 worthy either of the gift of life or of the ordi- 
 nance which symbolizes his care of that life by the 
 gift and impartation of himself, for you are not 
 worthy and never will consider yourself worthy, 
 yet you will strive to become worthy. But the 
 way you observe this Supper may be an entirely 
 worthy or unworthy way. The Corinthians did 
 it very unworthily, because they thought of it as 
 a regular feast to which they could come and 
 eat all the bread they wanted and drink all the 
 wine they could get hold of. So Paul tells them 
 to “examine yourselves” and see that you have 
 the right idea about it. The “worthy” way is 
 to discern the symbol within the substance, eat 
 and drink knowing what it is for, and respond to 
 its meaning. 
 
 4. Wrong Views 
 
 There have been wrong views developed. Of 
 course. That’s the way we have done with al- 
 most everything God has given us. What gift 
 of his have we not perverted both in our views 
 and in our use of it? 
 
 One wrong view is that the bread and the wine, 
 under the invocation of the one who administers 
 it, becomes the veritable, actual body and blood 
 of Christ. How this perversion came about will 
 be discussed more fully in the chapter on The 
 
 [31] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 Great Distinctive. Both baptism and the Sup- 
 per came to be regarded as saving rather than 
 symbolic ordinances. Heathen who came into 
 the church in the very early days brought that 
 idea, and they also brought the idea of a sacred 
 order called priests, who were necessary in admin- 
 _ istering the ordinances and gave to them a magi- 
 cal power. This is the teaching of the Roman 
 Catholic Church, and they call it transubstantia- 
 tion. ‘That is, the substance is changed, under the 
 blessing of the priest, into the actual body and 
 blood of Christ. That is the chief reason why 
 the priest drinks the wine, for it would not do 
 to spill a single drop of it, as might happen in 
 passing it around among the people, while the 
 people eat the bread because there is not so much 
 danger of losing any of it. 
 
 When Jesus said of the broken bread, “ This is 
 my body,” and of the wine, “ This is my blood, 
 which is shed for many, for the remission of 
 sins,’ he used a very familiar figure of speech 
 which we call a metaphor. If he had said, “ This 
 is like my body,” etc., it would have been a 
 simile, which is an expanded metaphor. But the 
 metaphor is an implied or unexpanded simile and 
 means exactly the same as if it had been ex- 
 panded. 
 
 There is another view called consubstantiation. 
 This was the view of Luther, who denied that the 
 bread and wine were changed into the veritable 
 body and blood of Jesus, but affirmed that his 
 “real presence ” was there “in, with, and under 
 
 [ 32 | 
 
Another Ceremony 
 
 
 
 the bread and wine,” and that it was a means 
 of grace because you actually partook of him. 
 When told that Christ was only at the right hand 
 of God, he replied that the right hand of God 
 was anywhere and everywhere. 
 
 John Calvin modified that view somewhat by 
 saying that, while the bread and wine are signs 
 of the body and blood of Christ, they are the in- 
 strumental means of his presence, and the Supper 
 is therefore a means of grace. 
 
 Zwingli was nearer the true view in saying 
 that ‘the Supper is a memorial or remembrance 
 of the sacrifice offered once for all by Christ, and 
 that it is not a continuance or repetition of the 
 original sacrifice of Christ, as taught by the 
 Roman Church, and by Luther and Calvin in a 
 modified way, also by some others. 
 
 Thus we see that what is known as sacramen- 
 talism changes the two ordinances to be some- 
 thing entirely different from what Christ de- 
 signed them to be. That view is held by the 
 Church of England as well as by the other 
 churches referred to. Sacramentalism is usually 
 wrapped up in what is known as sacerdotalism, 
 the existence of a sacred order in whom the 
 church really centers, so that the institution and 
 the official are so necessary to Chritianity that it 
 cannot exist apart from them. Everything is 
 created by the successors of the apostles, and the 
 ordinances are the channels through which God’s 
 grace flows to the people; the bishop is the succes- 
 sor of the apostles; the priest is ordained by him; 
 
 [ 33 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 without the priest there cannot be full worship 
 of God; the sacraments, baptism, and the Lord’s 
 Supper, are the means that must create and main- 
 tain the spiritual life. Baptism is “the great 
 sacrament of our regeneration,’ and the Supper, 
 or Eucharist as it is termed, “ our chief means 
 of communion with our Lord.” As R. J. Camp- 
 bell puts it, “ The incarnation, the atonement, the 
 extension of both in the sacraments, the ministry 
 which guards them, and the visible society itself 
 as the sphere of sacrificial grace—all these seem 
 to me to imply each other.” 
 
 All of which is foreign to the simplicity of 
 the gospel. The ordinances are not sacraments in 
 any such sense. They cannot save. They can- 
 not constitute a channel through which the grace 
 of God is extended to us. Such an idea shock- 
 ingly “limits the universality of divine grace,” 
 as Doctor Fairbairn points out, and conditions 
 the grace by imperfect men. 
 
 In order to observe the Supper properly you 
 should prepare for it. You do that by mentally 
 seeing the fact that Christ died for you, and this 
 vivid object-lesson of our sustenance by him is 
 only a dull hint of the glory that is in the actual 
 experience. The object-lesson keeps the truth 
 clear in the mind, appeals to the heart for its 
 gratitude and devotion, and stimulates the reso- 
 lution to become more worthy of it all. 
 
 You prepare for it by your experience in living 
 by him and doing his will. That stimulates the 
 hunger and the thirst of the soul and gives a more 
 
 [ 34 ] 
 
Another Ceremony 
 
 vivid sense of the truths set forth in the symbol. 
 
 In many of our churches a covenant-meeting 
 is held at the prayer-meeting preceding the ob- 
 servance of the Supper, and at such a meeting the 
 thoughts turn toward the essential idea in the 
 Supper. That is a good preparation. 
 
 Regularity in attending is the best sort of prep- 
 aration. If it should be impossible to attend but 
 one meeting in the month, let it be the Com- 
 munion service. 
 
 [35] 
 
Il 
 A BROTHERHOOD 
 
 On joining the church, you found yourself in 
 the midst of a brotherhood and an actual member 
 of it. 
 
 That meant three things: 
 
 1. Kinship 
 
 All the members were your spiritual kin in 
 Christ, unless, as may sometimes be the case, 
 there was one, here and there, who had not really 
 been born again. Wath such possible exceptions, 
 you had all been reborn, “not of blood, nor of 
 the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but 
 of God” (John1 : 13). The source of that new 
 life is God, the agent of it is the life-giving Spirit 
 of God, and the type after which you were reborn 
 is Jesus the Elder Brother. You found a family, 
 and you became at once and without any further 
 conditions as much a member of that family as 
 the oldest and most honored son or daughter. 
 Potential childship to God had become actual 
 through your vital union with Christ. 
 
 There are several duties that grow out of that 
 kinship. First is the duty to get acquainted with 
 all your kinsfolk. They are the best people there 
 
 [ 36 ] 
 
A Brotherhood 
 
 are. They will be an honor to you, even those 
 who are not prominent or mighty. Secondly, 
 make it easy for them to take you into their fel- 
 lowship, and comfortable to them while you are 
 in. Do not be offish. Do not wait to be coaxed 
 or especially noticed. Thirdly, live up to the 
 family ideals and traditions. You are no longer 
 isolated. You represent all the others; in fact, 
 the whole family. The general estimate of the 
 family of faith will depend on the way you rep- 
 resent them. If the reputation of that family 
 in the community has been lowered by some 
 unfortunate or erring member, it will be one of 
 your most sacred duties to restore its standing. 
 There will always be varieties of view on many 
 matters, but the exposure of the home interests to 
 outside and prejudiced onlookers will be a most 
 dastardly bit of unfaithfulness. Keep the family 
 secrets safe. 
 
 2. Equality 
 
 (1) No Privileged Classes. In certain coun- 
 tries where they have “ classes ” ordained by law, 
 or by custom and tradition, those who are called 
 the “ nobility ” constitute the “ privileged class,” 
 but there are none in this family, even though 
 some may have developed habits at variance with 
 the law of equality. When such habits are found, 
 they are in violation of Christian principles, and 
 are due to the weaknesses and faults which those 
 principles are seeking to correct. They violate 
 the law of the family of faith. 
 
 [ 37 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 (2) No Distinctions Within the Family. In 
 some countries there are distinctions made in 
 favor of the firstborn child, called the law of 
 primogeniture, under which the oldest son in- 
 herits the highest title, a larger part of the estate, 
 and the honor of being the family representative 
 in a legal and social way. Not so with your 
 church. You are just as much a representative 
 as the oldest and highest member, and all the 
 fame and honors and reputation and influence of 
 the family are yours. All of us are equal before 
 Christ, the Elder Brother. If the Head of the 
 family has any favorites at all, it must be the 
 most needy or those who serve most and best. 
 
 (3) No one has authority over your beliefs, 
 and you have all the rights and privileges that 
 any one else has, even though there may be great 
 inequality in talent and attainments and personal 
 values. Whatever authority may be invested in 
 given officers, it is so invested only for a given 
 period and purpose. It comes from God and 
 reaches them through the church, and you have 
 the same right to say who shall hold the office 
 that any other member of the church has. 
 
 (4) Because of that equality there are at least 
 two duties to be urged upon you: First, if you 
 are superior to any of the others in natural gifts 
 and attainments, you must hold those gifts and 
 attainments for the benefit of all and must bestow 
 them on the others, and not in a grudging or re- 
 luctant way, as of necessity, but cheerfully, joy- 
 ously, as paying a debt, a debt that grows greater 
 
 [ 38 ] 
 
A Brotherhood 
 
 with the effort to discharge it. You must recog- 
 nize, then, that the others have a right to all you 
 know and are and have, in the way of spiritual 
 value. Secondly, if you are inferior to any of 
 the members in your attainments, it is your right, 
 not privilege merely, but right, to avail yourself 
 of their gifts and graces and powers and thereby 
 enrich and empower yourself. Some of your fel- 
 low members may be distinguished intellectually, 
 or socially, or for eloquence or skill as religious 
 workers, or for personal influence or prominence 
 in their callings, but their fame is your fame, their 
 honors yours, their worth your worth. 
 
 3. Community of Interests 
 
 You have many things in common besides 
 equality of rights and privileges. 
 
 (1) Whatever interests the church as a whole 
 has, each member has—evangelistic, educational, 
 missionary, benevolent. To each group in the 
 church duties are assigned, yet to each group 
 belong the interests of the other groups. The 
 Sunday school worker is always interested in the 
 work of the young people, and the Ladies’ Aid 
 is not at all indifferent to the interests of the 
 Juniors or the Boys’ Band. Whatever section you 
 serve in, you belong to all. Whatever knowledge 
 you have, whatever wisdom, it belongs to all. It 
 must go to the market-place and not be wrapped 
 up in a napkin. You can never learn any truth 
 that does not belong to your brethren. (1 Tim. 
 
 6 : 17-19.) 
 [ 39 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 (2) Experiences are held in common, even 
 those that are most personal. Your joys and 
 sorrows are distributed to your fellow members. 
 Even the worst experience and the lack of ex- 
 perience are held in common. 
 
 (3) Your very faults belong to the other mem- 
 bers. You will learn that one of the most in- 
 teresting things about people is their faults. They 
 make you feel comfortable. It is almost a plea- 
 sure to find that others have faults as well as 
 yourself. That fellow feeling makes us won- 
 drous kind. You say to yourself, “ He hath but 
 stumbled in the path thou hast in weakness trod.” 
 The faults of others show you how not to do and 
 inspire you to unselfish efforts in their behalf, for 
 you have the guardianship of your brothers and 
 sisters in Christ and you must help them to mend 
 their ways, and do it in a loving, Christlike way. 
 They help you to correct your own faults. It 
 helps you to cultivate wisdom and tact and good- 
 ness. You not only have to live with people who, 
 like yourself, have faults, but you have to help 
 them overcome. (Gal. 6 : I-3.) 
 
 Now, in view of this community of interest 
 with your brethren, here are several very plain 
 duties : 
 
 It is of primary importance that you make it 
 as easy as possible for them to get along with 
 you. “Consider thyself, lest thou also be 
 tempted.” 
 
 Learn to do cooperative work, not only with 
 the few who are easy toe work with but with even 
 
 [ 40 | 
 
A Brotherhood 
 
 
 
 the most uncongenial and least companionable 
 and interesting. 
 
 Master the art of making their interests your 
 own and do it without seeming to intrude or to 
 regard yourself as their superior. 
 
 Try to become a wise counselor to whom peo- 
 ple will come of their own accord, knowing that 
 you can be trusted with delicate confidences and 
 weighty responsibilities of sympathy. 
 
 4 
 
 [41] 
 
Til 
 
 AN ORGANISM 
 
 1. An Organization 
 
 In coming into this brotherhood you found not 
 a mere aggregation of so many individuals, but 
 an organization; not a mob for guerrilla warfare, 
 but an army for regular service, coordinated, co- 
 operative, and, when in action, “terrible as an 
 army with banners’’; not simply so many mem- 
 bers of the body called the church, but the body 
 itself of which you are a member; not simply 
 so many living stones piled up together in im- 
 promptu order, or disorder, but all “ growing into 
 an holy temple’ whose walls glow with light and 
 expand by the laws of the heavenly architecture 
 upward and outward; not simply children of the 
 Father, but members of the Father’s household, 
 “the household of faith.”’ Organization in living 
 objects means two things: structure and function. 
 Together you and the rest of them form a struc- 
 ture, and together you perform functions that re- 
 quire more than one person. 
 
 2. An Organism 
 
 It is not only an organization but an organism, 
 as implied above. You are not only brought to- 
 gether, but “born” together; that is, “ born 
 
 [ 42 ] 
 
An Organism 
 
 
 
 again ” individually into a “together ” spirit and 
 destiny ; brought together, not by external power, 
 but by the inner pressure of the Spirit of God 
 who dwells within you. So the word “ organ- 
 ism” seems more apt than the word “ organiza- 
 tion,’ for, in all living things, it is life that 
 produces organization with its structure and func- 
 tions, but organization does not produce life. 
 Mechanism means death, while organism means 
 organization plus the life that produces it. You 
 are in a living body. 
 
 (1) You found that this organism, which we 
 call a church, 1s self-directive. Just as all the 
 individuals in the group have equal access to God 
 and to people, so each group has the same right 
 to deal directly with God as any other group. 
 There is no body in authority over the group that 
 you belong to. 
 
 At this point it will be well to classify the dif- 
 ferent types of church government, or polity, 
 with which the world is familiar. One is the pre- 
 latical, or episcopal type. Episcopos is the Greek 
 word which means overseer and is translated 
 bishop. An episcopacy means government by 
 bishops or grades of officials above the local 
 church. There are grades of this sort of gov- 
 ernment all the way from the absolute autocracy 
 of the Church of Rome, which does not permit its 
 members to interpret, and does not really permit 
 them to read, the Bible, does all their religious 
 thinking for them, and takes complete charge of 
 their souls, to the Protestant Episcopal Church, 
 
 [43 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 in which government comes down to the local 
 church from above it, on to the Methodist Church 
 where there is more real democracy than in any 
 other form of the episcopacy. 
 
 The presbyterial is another form of church 
 polity, which is government of the local church 
 by elders, the term presbyter being the English 
 equivalent of the Greek word presbuieros, 
 “elder.” This is an overhead government of 
 the local church through its representatives in 
 presbyteries. Elder and bishop in the New Tes- 
 tament designate one and the same office, each 
 indicating a special phase or function of it, the 
 term pastor being the one term that covers all 
 those functions. 
 
 The third form of government is the congrega- 
 tional. Each group governs itself, while many ~ 
 groups, which we call local churches, cooperate 
 in what we call associations and conventions. 
 They organize such bodies and control them, 
 are not controlled by them, and they thereby 
 carry out their own plans of larger cooperation. 
 
 That was the original form of church govern- 
 ment. If each individual has as much right to 
 deal with God and his fellow men as any one else, 
 so each group of individuals has as much right to 
 be self-directive as any other group. There is 
 every evidence that the New Testament churches 
 were autonomous and that there was room for 
 the fullest cooperation of all the congregations. 
 
 The idea has three special considerations in its 
 favor, in addition to the fact that the New Tes- 
 
 [44] 
 
An Organism 
 
 
 
 tament churches were independent in their organ- 
 ization, democratic, as we may say. First, it is in 
 harmony with the most fundamental function of 
 the human soul, namely, its right of self-direction. 
 No one loses that right in entering a group of 
 others that have the same right, nor does that 
 group lose its autonomy. Secondly, it is in har- 
 mony with the present trend in human develop- 
 ment. _ Democracy is the predestined form of 
 human government, in State and in Church. 
 Thirdly, those who hold to the congregational 
 form of government are the ones whose agitation 
 has produced those religious revolutions and ref- 
 ormations that have resulted in civil democracy 
 and freedom over the earth, as well as religious 
 liberty. 
 
 The objection has been raised that church de- 
 mocracy is too good for human nature, and the 
 objection is valid if we think of unregenerate 
 human nature, but it is just exactly the thing 
 for regenerate men and women. That is the 
 only kind of people for membership in any church. 
 It has been said that people need a stronger form 
 of government to hold them together, but the 
 bond of a new life in Christ is mightier than 
 any sort of legal or mechanical ties. The liga- 
 ments of life and of love are stronger than death 
 and sin and all human weakness. A regenerate 
 church-membership is fitted for self-government, 
 and no other kind is. 
 
 This organization is doing three distinct things 
 for you: 
 
 [45 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 First, it is conserving your individuality with 
 all its vital powers. A religious paternalism, an 
 autocracy, would be a mechanism, even though it 
 might be a very powerful one, and you would be 
 a cog, or bolt, or some other subordinate part 
 in the machine. There is individuality in you, 
 and the church preserves and develops that. 
 There is a multitudinous element in you, and it 
 develops that. There is a hunger in you, and it 
 satisfies that. There is a helplessness in you, and 
 it energizes that. There is a desire in you to im- 
 part, and it provides for that. You are even 
 more of an individual than when you came in. 
 Yes, it preserves your individuality while social- 
 izing you. 
 
 Secondly, it disciplines and nurtures the life. 
 It does that by its worship, by its instruction, by 
 the watch-care of the stronger over the weaker, 
 by the work it provides for you to do in an in- 
 dividual way, and especially by the work you do 
 in a cooperative way, by the attitude you take to- 
 ward the others and toward the world at large, 
 and by “the work of faith and labor of love and 
 patience of hope” to which it prompts you. It 
 suppresses no one but draws you into the high- 
 est expression of self and secures the finest dis- 
 cipline and development. 
 
 Thirdly, it completes you by socializing you. 
 You are associated with people in every stage 
 of growth, each “ going on unto perfection, all 
 growing into a full-grown man, unto the measure 
 of the stature of the fulness of Christ,’ growing 
 
 [ 46 ] 
 
An Organism 
 
 
 
 up ‘in all things unto him who is the head, even 
 Christ, from whom all the building fitly framed 
 and knit together through that which every joint 
 supplieth, according to the working in due mea- 
 sure of each several part, maketh the increase of 
 the body unto the building up of itself in love”’ 
 epi er s5-s16 ). 
 
 (2). In order to be self-directive, this organiza- 
 tion has leadership. Not drivership, for there’s 
 no place for a driver in the church. Nor does 
 it mean headship, for there is no head of the 
 church, whether we mean the local group, or use 
 the word loosely to mean organized Christianity, 
 save the Lord Jesus Christ whom God gave “ to 
 be head over all things to the church, which is his 
 body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all” 
 Pepiinie: 62223), 
 
 Leadership is essential to any working body, 
 for evident reasons. In the church there are two 
 types of work, and therefore we have two kinds 
 of leaders, or officers, if we prefer the latter term. 
 That is, it is in the nature of the group to require 
 two kinds of leadership. 
 
 There is what we may call the spiritual leader- 
 ship. That is an inclusive term, and it means 
 those who lead in the development of character 
 and the conduct of work by preaching, teaching, 
 directing work, shepherding the people. 
 
 We call them by several names, mostly pastor, 
 though the terms “elder”? and “bishop” refer 
 to the same office, each one emphasizing a special 
 phase of the service rendered. The term “ pastor ” 
 
 [47] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 means a “ shepherd,’ and the pastor does what 
 the Eastern shepherd did for his flock, he feeds 
 them, as Jesus said to Peter three times, “‘ Feed 
 my sheep,” “ Feed my lambs.” He also weighs 
 their duties and aids them, as the old elders of 
 the Jews did, the word elder meaning the “ aged,” 
 just as did the Latin word “senator.” He 
 “‘ oversees’ as director of work. We sum it all 
 up in the term pastor or minister. The latter 
 means servant, and that fully describes his work. 
 
 The other office is that of deacon. This word 
 also means servant, and the office was instituted 
 to serve the people on the more material side. It 
 has followed the people in their needs and aids 
 the pastor in still more intimate ways. 
 
 The two are the permanent New Testament 
 offices. Paul gives instructions to the young min- 
 ister Timothy (1 Tim. 3: 1-15) about the of- 
 ficers of the church, calling them bishops and 
 deacons. He addresses his letter to the Philip- 
 pians “to all the saints,” and adds “with the 
 bishops and deacons.’’ Peter writes about the 
 same office and calls it that of elder (1 Peter 
 5 : 1-4), and says, “ The elders who are among 
 you I exhort, who am also an elder,’ which 
 means the same office as bishop, and he tells the 
 elders what to do, how to act the pastor—* feed 
 the flock,’ adding, “ When the great Shepherd 
 shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory.” 
 We never take the time to use all these three 
 words, but we convey them all in the word pastor 
 or minister. 
 
 [ 48 | 
 
An Organism 
 
 
 
 These two officers are required in the very 
 nature of the organization, and each one is called 
 into action as need requires. 
 
 There are other leaders required for specific 
 work, like teachers and trustees, visitors, helpers 
 with the poor, directors of education and mis- 
 sions and music. They are needed in the com- 
 plex life into which we are growing, but those 
 named above are the two structural offices of the 
 church, given by the Master for its efficiency 
 and success, and are therefore permanent. 
 
 (3) There are three requirements of all the of- 
 ficers and leaders of the church: 
 
 First of all, they must be chosen for the work. 
 They are to be servants, and they must be 
 chosen, not by themselves, but by the members 
 of the church; not by some other church, nor by 
 some group of officials over the church, for there 
 is no group higher in authority than the local 
 church itself, but by the local church which they 
 are to serve. In that choice you have a voice and 
 a vote, and it counts one just as any other vote 
 counts one, even though others may be older in 
 years and experience and wisdom and personal 
 influence. That right may never be taken away 
 from you by any one or any group. It is yours 
 as long as you are in the church. When they 
 needed “the seven” in the church at Jerusalem, 
 Peter did not say, “Tl look out some suitable 
 men for the place,’ but he said to the church, 
 “Look ye out from among you seven men,” and 
 all had a voice in it. 
 
 [ 49 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 Secondly, they must have actual or potential fit- 
 ness for the position to which they are appointed. 
 The office is not hereditary, nor is the fitness 
 hereditary or official, but personal. Natural gifts 
 and training, spiritual graces and experience 
 give their varying fitness. There must also be 
 fitness that grows with experience in the work. 
 When any one shows that he is not fitted, or 
 declines in the fitness that he showed at the be- 
 ginning, he should be retired from the office in 
 a Christlike way. You are under obligation to 
 participate in all of this. 
 
 Thirdly, all must have the spirit of service. 
 That’s what the words “ minister’ and “ deacon ”’ 
 mean. ‘The Master said he came not to be min- 
 istered unto, but to minister and to give his life | 
 a ransom for all, and he asks, “‘ Is the servant 
 above his Lord?” Peter warned those who are 
 in positions of leadership not to “lord it over 
 God’s heritage,” but to “ feed the flock of God... 
 willingly, .. of a ready mind ” (1 Peter 5: 2, 3). 
 
 3. Therefore Your Duties in the Case 
 
 (1) Be asound member of the body of Christ, 
 not a diseased member, like a sore foot that can- 
 not walk on errands, or a palsied hand that can- 
 not lift, or a stiff shoulder that cannot get under 
 burdens, or a blind eye that cannot see the tasks 
 that are near you, or a bad heart that gives out 
 under the strain of work, or a deaf ear that can- 
 not hear the calls for help. Be a good, sound 
 member. 
 
 [50 ] 
 
An Organism 
 
 (2) Never fail to exercise your right or face 
 your obligation to have a part in the selection of 
 those who are to lead. You must always be able 
 to say heartily, ““ my pastor ’ and “ my deacons.”’ 
 If you do not, you become atrophied; you will 
 excuse yourself from obvious duties; you will be- 
 come a disturber; you will make yourself in a 
 degree an outsider. 
 
 (3) Support them so that they can succeed. 
 They cannot succeed unless you do support them. 
 Help them by following them in the work in 
 which you and the others ask them to lead. Re- 
 member that it was you who conferred the power 
 on them. When you think they are failing, re- 
 member they may be failing simply for the lack 
 of the support you might give them. That may 
 save them from humiliating failure and save the 
 cause from injury. Honor requires that you 
 support them. Self-respect requires it. 
 
 (4) Make yourself so efiicient in any work you 
 do in the church that you will be ready for any 
 position that is offered you. You prepare for it 
 unconsciously by being faithful to every duty as- 
 signed to you and by trying to understand the 
 duties of the positions held by others. Be pre- 
 pared to answer God’s call to the ministry or to 
 other work that needs you. 
 
 [51] 
 
IV; 
 ACCUMULATED TREASURES 
 
 Of course you didn’t find everything perfect in 
 the church, but you found treasures that had been 
 accumulating for centuries. 
 
 1. Treasures of Truth 
 
 The big ideas of life were there. They had 
 been gathered from the Scriptures, from the 
 teachings of the great students and preachers and 
 from Christian people of all kinds. They had 
 been reduced to practice, and that has clarified 
 them, defined them, and made them human. 
 They were not shut up in the church or in the 
 Bible, for all truths are for all people, but they 
 had been massed and humanized among the peo- 
 ple of God. 
 
 There is truth about God, as disclosed by Jesus 
 and by the writers of the Bible and tested in life 
 by God’s people. This was ready for distribution 
 in the church—the truth as to God’s majesty and 
 mercy, his greatness and his grace. There is 
 truth about the origin of man, his sins, his strug- 
 gles, his perfections in Christ, the sacredness of 
 life, its possibilities. Truth also about home and 
 human relationships, God’s ownership of us, and 
 
 [ 52 ] 
 
Accumulated Treasures 
 
 our stewardship over our possessions, our respon- 
 sibility for the care of mankind. All the big ideas 
 of life were in that group which you entered, 
 and they were worked out in practice, refined by 
 use, illuminated in character. 
 
 2. Treasures of Ideals 
 
 That means the attitude people take toward the 
 truths they hold or are taught as they use their 
 imaginations about life and mankind and God 
 _ and Jesus. They dream dreams and see visions. 
 They create an atmosphere. You come to see 
 what they see, but in your own way. You 
 breathe in the atmosphere. You found ideals of 
 that sort, held by imperfect people who were 
 often unchristlike, but there is purity in them, 
 and your own vision is clarified. 
 
 3. Treasures of Habit 
 
 There are habits of worship, and you fell into | 
 them, modifying them by your own experience; 
 habits of Bible study which have helped you to 
 work out your own method of using the great 
 book; habits of giving, for you found the people 
 using their money for the glory of God and under 
 his guidance, thereby indicating both where and 
 how you might meet your Lord’s wishes for you; 
 habits of interpreting God’s movements and en- 
 terprises in the world that throw light on your 
 own life and make for you one of the most in- 
 teresting exercises of mind and heart; habits of 
 work. 
 
 [53 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 4. Treasures of Character 
 
 The best people in the world, taking them all 
 together, are in the church. Their characters are 
 your joy. They show the direction which your 
 own development will take, show your possi- 
 bilities, lure you on in realizing them. All possi- 
 ble virtues are there, some in full bloom, some in 
 the budding stage, others only a prophecy. The 
 characters of the church people became your pos- 
 session. They enrich you. 
 
 All these treasures have been gathering for 
 centuries for you. You had nothing to do with 
 producing them. ‘Thousands of people have been 
 bringing them there for you. Remember the 
 lines of Sam Walter Foss: 
 
 This rose I cut with careless shears, 
 And wear and cast away, 
 
 The cosmos wrought a million years 
 To make it mine a day. 
 
 This lily by the pasture bars, 
 
 Beneath the walnut tree, 
 
 Long ere the fire-mists formed in stars 
 Was on its way to me. 
 
 Only they are yours for all time. God had been 
 directing all those thousands of people in their 
 preparations for you. I ought to say millions in- 
 stead of thousands. You have suddenly come 
 into the possession of the most precious estate 
 any one ever did inherit this side of the glory 
 land. Iam not saying the people are perfect or 
 
 [ 54] 
 
Accumulated Treasures 
 
 that the treasures are unmingled with impurities. 
 But they were made ready for you; there they 
 ~ are, and they are yours. 
 
 5. Treasures of Work 
 
 Work has been accumulating for them and for 
 you. Here are some duties: 
 
 (1) Appreciate those treasures and their pro- 
 ducers. Realize your indebtedness to those who 
 came before you into the church, those of the 
 distant as well as the nearer past. 
 
 (2) Appropriate them. ‘That’s what they are 
 for. It would be a sin not to do so. Yet those 
 treasures are to be used not in the spirit of a 
 slave or of a dolt but with discretion. 
 
 (3) Be a producer of virtue and of all the 
 spiritual values you have found in the church. 
 Otherwise you are only a consumer, not a produc- 
 ing member of the church—an unnatural person. 
 
 (4) Transmit them to the next to come in and 
 see that others fall heir to them as you have done. 
 Otherwise there is a break in the chain of pro- 
 duction, and you go down in history as a para- 
 site, inheriting and not bequeathing, receiving 
 and not bestowing, consuming and not producing. 
 
 [55 ] 
 
V 
 THE BAPTIST DISTINCTIVE 
 
 Is there a Baptist Distinctive, one definite 
 thing that makes one a Baptist—without which 
 one is not a Baptist even. though a member of a 
 Baptist church—with which one is a Baptist in 
 theory even though not a member of a Baptist 
 church and a Baptist in practise when trying to 
 live up to it? 
 
 There is such a Distinctive. 
 
 What is it? 
 
 1. What It Is Not 
 
 One person, knowing that we practise immer- 
 sion and neither sprinkling nor pouring, says, 
 “Immersion is your distinctive.” My reply is 
 that there are other* denominations which prac- 
 tise immersion alone, the Greek Church, for in- 
 stance, which is the present State Church of 
 Greece and was formerly the State Church of 
 Russia. Our distinctive is something that lies 
 back of immersion and requires it. 
 
 Another, seeing that we never baptize infants, 
 says, “ Adult baptism must be your distinctive.” 
 That is a double mistake. We never use the term 
 “adult baptism,” for an adult is a grown person, 
 and a child reaches the age when he may intel- 
 ligently accept Christ and obey him in his ordi- 
 
 [ 56 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 nance of baptism long before he is grown. No 
 child ought to postpone the acceptance of Christ 
 as his Saviour and obedience to him in baptism 
 until he is an adult. I have baptized many boys 
 and girls of twelve, many also of ten, some of 
 nine, a few of eight, and once I baptized a little 
 girl of seven, who was just as competent to ac- 
 cept Jesus and be baptized as if she were seventy. 
 No, we do not say “ adult,” but “ believer’s bap- 
 tism.” Even that is not our distinctive, but the 
 distinctive lies back of believer's baptism and re- 
 quires it. 
 
 Still others, without much thought, may sup- 
 pose it is our independent, congregational form 
 of church government. No, some other denom- 
 inations have that form of government who are 
 not Baptists. Our distinctive lies back of that 
 and requires it. 
 
 2. What It Is 
 
 When we find it, it must not be out of harmony 
 with the human distinctive, for that would bring 
 perpetual conflict. And what is the human dis- 
 tinctive? It is personality, and the distinctive of 
 personality is consciousness, with power of choice 
 and self-direction. 
 
 Nor may our distinctive be out of harmony 
 with the divine distinctive. What is that? Ex- 
 actly the same as the human: personality with 
 consciousness, choice, self-direction. In Him it is 
 perfect; in us imperfect. When God made man 
 in his own image, that image was personality 
 
 [57] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 which shows itself in consciousness, choice, self- 
 direction. Our distinctive must not antagonize 
 the distinctive of God or of man. 
 
 This is what it is: dny person who ever lived 
 or ever could live, has as much inherent right to 
 deal personally with God as any other person who 
 ever did or ever could live. That is to say, there 
 is something in the human soul, something in 
 God, something in our relations to each other and 
 to God, which makes it just as right for one per- 
 son to have dealings with God as for any other 
 person. 
 
 That distinctive has a fourfold support: 
 
 (1) Inthe fact that all men were made in the 
 one image, not part of the human family in that 
 image and part in another, but all in that image - 
 and therefore all with equal rights. 
 
 (2) In the universal human instinct of free- 
 dom. There never was a person born into the 
 world who did not feel that he had as much right 
 to be free as any one else, though we may find 
 some in whom that instinct has been assassinated 
 or asphyxiated, and who are perverted types of 
 human beings. 
 
 (3) In the Christian instinct of fraternity 
 which is found in all real Christians. In being 
 born again we get a new type of love, as Paul 
 says, “ Ye yourselves are taught of God to love 
 one another.’’ There is a love growing out of 
 every relationship ; and toward all other followers 
 of Christ every real Christian has the feeling of a 
 brother and an equal before God. 
 
 [ 58 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 (4) In the definite word of Jesus when he 
 said, “ Call no man master on earth, for one is 
 your master, even Christ,’ and again he says, 
 “All ye are brethren.” 
 
 The correlative of that distinctive is the obliga- 
 tion of all to have personal dealings with God, 
 an obligation, however, which no other human be- 
 ing, but only God, can enforce. And he has made 
 perfect arrangements to do so through Jesus 
 Christ, in whom he has stored all authority; and 
 he has made it all known in the story of Christ 
 which we call the Bible, so that we can say with 
 our Baptist fathers, ‘“‘ The Bible is our sole rule 
 of faith and practise.” 
 
 Such is our distinctive. No man nor group of 
 men can stand between any soul and God and say 
 to that soul: “‘ Unless you pass through my hands 
 you cannot have any dealings with God, cannot 
 be saved; unless you accept my instructions and 
 submit to my demands, God will not have any- 
 thing to do with you.” We say that only God 
 can rule the soul, that he does so in Christ, and 
 that he gives us adequate instructions about him 
 and about all our duties in the Bible. 
 
 3. Interferences With Its Working 
 
 Grounded in the nature of man and the nature 
 of God, with support in the human instinct of 
 freedom and in the Christian instinct of frater- 
 nity, and recognized and commanded directly by 
 Jesus our Master, how could it ever be over- 
 thrown or even overlooked ? 
 
 [59 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 It must be remembered that there are other ele- 
 ments in human nature. On the one hand, there 
 are weaknesses of many kinds, such as fear, 
 ignorance, superstition, and what the psycholo- 
 gists call the “inferiority complex.’ On the 
 other hand we find vanity, pride of possession, 
 passion for power and rulership, and the supe- 
 riority complex. As a result the strong have 
 domineered over the weak and made use of them; 
 habits have been formed, traditions set in action, 
 and institutions developed which have made it 
 the interest of the strong to interfere with the 
 working of that distinctive and impossible for the 
 weak to maintain and assert their faith in their 
 inherent rights. 
 
 The way it all came about opens one of the 
 most tragical chapters in human history. 
 
 The first converts to the Christian faith were 
 Jews, but soon Gentile converts began to come 
 in. They came out of religions that were full of 
 superstition. Two of those superstitions were 
 that of the magical power of ceremonies and that 
 of the magical power of a sacred order, a priest- 
 hood. 
 
 It was hard to throw off those superstitions. 
 They clung to some of the converts who, when 
 they saw the ceremony called baptism and the 
 one called the Holy Supper, thought there must 
 be magic in them. They talked about it; the 
 idea spread. Soon they connected salvation with 
 the ordinance of baptism; at length they said it 
 was not only essential to salvation but was ac- 
 
 [ 60 | 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 tually salvation itself, a “ regenerating bath.” In 
 other words, a man stood between his fellow men 
 and God and told them they could not reach God 
 except through him; they must pass through his 
 hands and be manipulated by him with the ordi- 
 nance of baptism, else God would not save them, 
 but would send them to hell. 
 
 That is the first interference with our distinc- 
 tive which history reveals. By the end of the 
 first century that idea was at work and at the 
 time of Tertullian, who was active from about 
 A. D. 190 to 220, it was generally held. He 
 wrote, “ Is it not wonderful that death should be 
 washed away by bathing?” and again, ‘“ Water 
 alone—always a perfect, gladsome, simple, mate- 
 rial substance, pure in itseli—supplied a worthy 
 vehicle for God”; and, “ Water was the first to 
 produce that which had life, that it might be no 
 wonder if in baptism water knew how to give 
 life’; also, “‘ The nature of the water, sanctified 
 by the Holy One, itself conceived withal the power 
 of sanctifying,’ and “ All waters, therefore, in 
 virtue of the pristine privilege of their origin, do, 
 after invocation of God, attain the sacramental 
 power of sanctification; for the Spirit imme- 
 diately supervenes from the heavens and rests 
 over the waters, sanctifying them from himself; 
 and, being thus sanctified, they imbibe at the same 
 time the power of sanctifying.” In other words, 
 a man got in between the soul and God and told 
 him that, even though he had repented, he 
 could not be saved unless he, the minister or 
 
 [ 61 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 priest, brought about his salvation with the cere- 
 mony of baptism. 
 
 That defeated the very purpose of Jesus in giv- 
 ing baptism. He gave it as a symbol of death 
 and resurrection, as Paul tells us in Romans 6 : 
 3-6: “ We are buried with him by baptism into 
 death, that, like as Christ was raised up from the 
 dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also 
 should walk in newness of life: for, if we have 
 been in the likeness of his death, we shall also be 
 in the likeness of his resurrection.” 
 
 In being baptized one is preaching the gospel in 
 a living tableau, saying, “ This is a picture of 
 what saves me, namely, the death of Christ for 
 my sins and his resurrection for my justification.” 
 One is also telling one’s Christian experience, say- 
 ing, “ This is a picture of the way it saved me, 
 by my dying to sin and rising to a new life.” One 
 is also proclaiming one’s hope of resurrection, 
 saying in symbol, “ This is a picture of what my 
 body shall experience when it is raised from the 
 grave.” 
 
 But Christ’s purpose was defeated when they 
 made baptism a saving rather than a symbolical 
 ordinance. Baptism is gone, even though the 
 form might remain. 
 
 Evil results followed from which the Christian 
 world is suffering even today. An almost in- 
 evitable change in the ordinance of baptism took 
 place. A man was dying. He had repented of 
 his sins and was trusting in Christ for salvation, 
 but he could not be baptized. They were in a 
 
 [ 62 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 dilemma. If he died without baptism, he would 
 go to hell; if they attempted to baptize him, it 
 would kill him and send him to hell so much 
 quicker. Instead of telling the poor fellow that 
 baptism had nothing on earth to do with his sal- 
 vation and that faith in a living and loving and 
 mighty Saviour was the only requirement, they 
 told him there was no hope for him at all. And 
 they were actually honest about it. How they 
 could think God was such a being is beyond me. 
 A God who would not listen to the cry of such a 
 penitent and would send him to hell for want 
 of manipulation by some one with a material cere- 
 mony, even so sacred and beautiful a ceremony 
 as baptism, isa God whom every free and rational 
 soul would have to despise. 
 
 But there is usually a way out of every dif- 
 ficulty, whether a right or a wrong way, and it is 
 not surprising that finally one man tapped his 
 dome of thought and said, with unspeakable re- 
 lief: “I have it. Let’s pour water all over him 
 and make it look as much like baptism as pos- 
 sible, and perhaps the church will accept it, not 
 as the real thing, but as a substitute allowable 
 in the circumstances.”’ 
 
 It was accepted reluctantly and under protest. 
 But the next time it was easier, and from pour- 
 ing water all over a person to pouring it on his 
 forehead, and finally sprinkling it on him was a 
 perfectly easy and natural transition. The 
 sprinkling and pouring were not regarded as bap- 
 tism but as permissible substitutes, and thus we 
 
 [ 63 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 have the two substitutes based on the supersti- 
 tion that baptism is a saving rather than a sym- 
 bolical ordinance. 
 
 No one claimed that they were the real baptism. 
 They knew the meaning of the three Greek words 
 —baptizo, to immerse, rhantizo, to sprinkle, and 
 echeo, to pour. We transfer the word baptizo 
 into our language, and call it “ baptize,’ and the 
 noun baptisma we call baptism. If we had trans- 
 lated it we should have said ‘‘immerse” and 
 “immersion.” They never thought of translat- 
 ing the word by “sprinkling” or “ pouring” 
 any more than the word rhantizo by the word 
 “immerse” or “pour,” or the word echeo by 
 “sprinkle”? or “immerse.” It was generations . 
 after that, when the two substitutes gained a 
 vogue of their own, that those who practised 
 them sought to find support for them in the Bible, 
 and even today some are trying to do so. No 
 scholar now claims that the word transferred into 
 our language and called “ baptize”’ means any- 
 thing more than “‘ immerse,” nor does any histo- 
 rian claim that sprinkling and pouring are 
 anything but man-made substitutes based on the 
 idea of baptismal salvation. Every time one of 
 the substitutes is used it is a proclamation of the 
 superstition out of which it arose. 
 
 All the scholars affirm that Jesus and his dis- 
 ciples used the word which means immerse and 
 never used the well-known words which mean 
 sprinkle and pour. (See especially Liddell and 
 Scott’s and Thayer’s New Testament lexicons. ) 
 
 [ 64 | 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 The great classical writers, both Greek and Latin, 
 agree with them. The Greek Fathers, from Bar- 
 nabas, A. D. 117, to Basil, A. D. 330, know only 
 immersion. The Latin Fathers from Tertullian, 
 A. D. 150, to Alcuin, A. D. 735, agree with them. 
 All the councils of the Roman church, from the 
 Council of Nice, A. D. 325, to the Council of 
 Nismes, A. D. 1284, decreed immersion and only 
 allowed sprinkling and pouring when immersion 
 was not possible. The church liturgies and 
 rituals, Gothic, Syrian, Italian, French, English, 
 prescribe immersion, in accordance with which, 
 as Dean Stanley asserts, “ Edward VI and Eliza- 
 beth were both immersed.”’ The Greek church, in 
 Greece and Russia, which ought to know the 
 meaning of Greek words, practises only immer- 
 sion. Catholic writers like Cardinal Gibbons, and 
 Episcopal writers like Wall, Dean Stanley, Elli- 
 cott, Geike, Canon Liddon, Dean Alford, Eder- 
 sheim, Bishop Cleveland Cox, Canon Farrar; and 
 Presbyterian writers like Calvin, Beza, Zwingle, 
 Turretin, Baxter, George Campbell, Philip Schaff, 
 Trumbull; and Methodists like Wesley, Adam 
 Wlatkern Gove beret, J. E. Hunt;’ thevereat 
 Lutherans, like Martin Luther, Meyer, Harnack, 
 and others say immersion is the meaning of the 
 word baptism, and was the practise of the early 
 centuries. The great commentators, like Meyer, 
 Godet, Ellicott, Lightfoot, Olshausen, Plumptree, 
 and others, too numerous to name, testify to the 
 same thing. So do writers on the life of Christ 
 and the life of Paul, like Geike, Stalker, Eder- 
 
 [ 65 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 sheim, Conybeare and Howson. A few words 
 from Dean Stanley, of the Church of England, 
 will sum up the testimony of hundreds of Pedo- 
 baptist scholars: 
 
 For the first thirteen centuries the almost universal 
 practise of baptism was that of which we read in the 
 New Testament, and which is the very meaning of the 
 word baptize, that those who were baptized were 
 plunged, submerged, immersed into the water. 
 
 And again: 
 
 There can be no question that the original form of 
 baptism—the very meaning of the word—was complete 
 immersion in the deep baptismal waters, and that for the 
 first four centuries any other form was either unknown, - 
 or regarded, unless in the case of dangerous illness, 
 as an exceptional, almost a monstrous case. The change 
 from immersion to sprinkling has set aside the larger 
 part of the apostolic language regarding baptism, and 
 has altered the very meaning of the word. 
 
 The two substitutes were bitterly opposed ex- 
 cept in cases of critical sickness, but by the time 
 of the Catholic Council of Ravenna, 1311, they 
 had won their way and were officially pronounced 
 real baptism by the church on the ground that 
 the church had the right to change the form of 
 baptism. But every time one of the substitutes 
 is used it is a proclamation of the superstition out 
 of which it arose. 
 
 A second interference with our distinctive came 
 as a matter of course. If no one can be saved 
 without baptism, then infants dying unbaptized 
 
 [ 66 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 will go to hell. It will not do to let God send 
 the innocent things to hell, so they administered 
 baptism to them—something done to the child 
 without his knowledge or consent rather than 
 something done by the child out of loving loyalty 
 to Christ when he can accept him as Saviour and 
 Master and obey him from choice. 
 
 At first, they baptized only children who were 
 in immediate danger of death. Later they con- 
 cluded that baptism was necessary in order to 
 cleanse out hereditary sin. Still later, they came 
 to believe that mortal sins committed after bap- 
 tism could never be forgiven, so they waited until 
 they thought the child was strong enough to 
 guard himself against mortal sins before they bap- 
 tized him. But by the middle of the third cen- 
 tury they had developed their theology so as to 
 admit that those who had lapsed into mortal sin 
 after baptism might be restored and, from that 
 time, the practise of infant baptism has been very 
 prevalent. It was all done to save the child from 
 hell in case he died in infancy. What a strange 
 and repulsive God they made of our loving heav- 
 enly Father. Infant baptism constituted the sec- 
 ond interference with the working of our distinc- 
 tive. 
 
 A third interference was developing. One of 
 the superstitions which some of the converts from 
 the Gentile religions brought with them was that 
 of the magical power of a priesthood. Power 
 began to become localized in the officers of the 
 church and those officers became graded. If one 
 
 [ 67 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 person has as much inherent right as another 
 to deal personally with God, then one group has 
 as much right as another group, without over- 
 head control from any man or set of men; but 
 that was changed and a hierarchy grew up with 
 power centered in bishops and archbishops, and, 
 the perversion became complete, it all headed up 
 uw the pope of Rome. 1 cannot do better than 
 quote from Dr. A. H. Newman in his “ History 
 of Anti-Pedobaptism: 
 
 Other perversions of Christianity during the early 
 centuries are so universally recognized by historians 
 and so familiar to all readers of church history, that 
 they need only be barely mentioned here. Sacerdotal- 
 ism, a constant factor in pagan religious systems, soon. 
 intruded itself into the Christian church. The ordi- 
 nances, having become mysteries, must be administered 
 by a ceremonially qualified priesthood; and, as the ser- 
 vices became elaborate and each function must be per- 
 formed by a properly qualified functionary, clerical 
 gradations came to be multiplied and accurately differ- 
 entiated. Out of the simple polity of the apostolic time, 
 in accordance with which each congregation chose its 
 own bishops or presbyters and deacons for the direction 
 of the spiritual work of the body, the administration of 
 discipline and the collection and distribution of char- 
 ities, there was developed, under the influences of the 
 time, a system of presidential administration in which 
 the chief elder (or bishop) directed the affairs of the 
 local church with the assistance and advice of a board 
 of presbyters. As the responsible head of the church 
 he soon came to have chief control of the finances, and 
 such control tended to increase his relative importance. 
 As Christian work spread from older centers the newly 
 established congregations were kept in relations of de- 
 pendence on the mother church, or, rather, as integral 
 
 [ 68 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 parts thereof. Thus the pastor of the central church 
 would have the supervision of a greater or smaller num- 
 ber of outside congregations, over each of which a pres- 
 byter of the central church came to preside. Thus arose 
 diocesan episcopacy. At first this arrangement was 
 adopted without any ambitious intentions on the part 
 of the pastors as seemingly the most effective way of 
 conducting Christian work. But, as the dependent con- 
 gregations became conscious of strength and their pres- 
 byter-pastors became restless under episcopal control, 
 ' which in some cases was no doubt arbitrarily exercised, 
 friction arose between bishops and presbyters. By that 
 time (about the middle of the third century—the case 
 of Cyprian and the Carthaginian presbyters is in point) 
 the sacerdotal idea was pretty fully developed. Cyprian 
 and those who were like-minded believed that eccle- 
 siastical unity was absolutely essential and that schism 
 was one of the greatest of evils. They went so far as to 
 maintain that outside of the one ecclesiastical organ- 
 ization, whose center of unity was found in the epis- 
 copate, there is no salvation. By the strong opposition 
 that the presbyters made to the assumption of authority 
 on the part of the bishops the latter were led to assert 
 the divine right and the irresponsibility of bishops. 
 The same sense of the necessity of organic union and 
 unity of administration afterward led to the centraliza- 
 tion of authority in metropolitans and finally in the 
 
 papacy. 
 To quote further from Doctor Newman: 
 
 No less destructive of the spirit of primitive Chris- 
 tianity was the early intrusion of the doctrine of the 
 meritoriousness of external works. Jews and pagans 
 alike attached great merit to almsgiving, fasting, and 
 the frequent utterance of fixed forms of prayer. By 
 the middle of the third century leading churchmen like 
 Cyprian did not hesitate to teach that almsgiving is a 
 means of securing the remission of sins and of pur- 
 chasing an eternal inheritance. 
 
 [ 69 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 Asceticism also was imported into early Christianity 
 from paganism. ‘This disposition to regard the body 
 as intrinsically evil and all natural impulses as worthy 
 only of being trampled upon is a common feature of 
 pagan religions. Fanatical seeking for martyrdom, ex- 
 cessive fasting, and the exaltation of virginity were the 
 earliest forms of Christian asceticism. It culminated 
 in the brutalities of hermit life. 
 
 Superstition and idolatry were universally prevalent 
 in ancient paganism as they are in modern. They per- 
 vaded and corrupted every department of life and oc- 
 cupied a most prominent place in the popular conscious- 
 ness. In proportion as Christianity increased in popular 
 influence and enjoyed immunity from persecution was 
 the accession to the church of unchristianized or im- 
 perfectly Christianized life.. Not only did the ordinances 
 assume a pagan hue and sacerdotal and ascetic ideas 
 become prevalent, but idolatrous practises corresponding 
 in almost every detail with those of the surrounding 
 heathenism came to be openly indulged in and re- 
 garded as Christian. The exaltation of saints and 
 martyrs, the worship of images of Christ and the saints, 
 the veneration of bones and other relics of the worthies 
 of the past, pilgrimages to shrines and other holy places, 
 vigils at the tombs of saints, the invocation of Mary the 
 mother of Jesus as “the mother of God,” the invocation 
 of saints, belief in the efficacy of relics and shrines to 
 cure diseases—these and many like superstitious prac- 
 tises were countenanced by some of the ablest and 
 holiest of the Christian leaders of the fourth and fol- 
 lowing centuries and, by the fifth century, had become 
 well-nigh universal. 
 
 Thus we see that two forces were at work 
 changing the church, one from the inside, another 
 from without. People came into the church to be 
 saved, not because they were saved. They re- 
 versed the essential order by trying to get to 
 
 [ 70 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 Christ through the church instead of getting into 
 the church through Christ. The church filled up 
 with people who were not Christians at all and 
 they brought their paganism with them. The 
 church of the apostles was gone and a semi- 
 heathen organization had now been developed in 
 its place. 
 
 A fourth interference came along with the de- 
 velopment of the power of this tremendous organ- 
 ization, and that was the union of Church and 
 State. The Roman Emperors were shrewd rulers 
 and showed a masterful skill in controlling the 
 nations which they conquered. Their method was 
 to Romanize them as thoroughly as _ possible. 
 They knew the value of religion and its sanc- 
 tions in controlling their subjects. Constantine 
 was converted before his death, and his successor, 
 Theodosius, who felt the need of this rising re- 
 ligion in his business of ruling, adopted it, uniting 
 Church and State in one of the most unholy 
 unions that ever disgraced humanity. Fora State 
 Church is a twofold monstrosity—a perversion 
 of the function of government and an assault on 
 the most distinctive thing in human nature, 
 namely, the power of choice. Through the cen- 
 turies many thousands were made martyrs 
 through the operation of that inhuman infamy 
 which for so long occupied the seat of power, 
 successfully maintaining itself against protest 
 and challenge and denunciation. 
 
 From that day till the year 1638 there was not 
 a country on the face of the earth where the 
 
 [71] 
 
You and Your Church - 
 
 Christian religion prevailed but Church and State 
 were united in compelling the people to support 
 the Church and in suppressing any éffort of any- 
 body to exercise his God-given right of dealing 
 with God personally as he and the Spirit of God 
 might order. 
 
 A fifth interference was in taking the Bible 
 away from the people as a dangerous book and 
 making the church superior to it. The officials 
 knew that if the people read the Bible they would 
 revolt against their unbiblical, unchristian, and 
 inhuman assumption of the authority that belongs 
 to God alone, so they said to the people, “ You 
 cannot understand it, besides you have not time 
 to read it; we will read it and tell you all you 
 need to know.”’ 
 
 So here are the five interferences with the 
 working of our distinctive in their historical 
 sequence: Putting one man between other men 
 and God and requiring them to pass through his 
 hands and be manipulated with the beautiful ordi- 
 nance of baptism; secondly, administering bap- 
 tism to infants instead of allowing them to obey 
 Christ for themselves when they are old enough 
 to accept him; thirdly, by destroying the indepen- 
 dence of groups of individuals called churches 
 and developing a graded official life in which was 
 centered all authority over the local churches; 
 fourthly, the unholy union of Church and State; 
 fifthly, denying the Bible to the laity and making 
 it second in authority to the officials who consti- 
 tuted the Church. 
 
 [72] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 4. The Age-long Effort for the Recovery of the 
 Distinctive 
 
 Three things are necessary for its recovery. 
 
 (1) Lhe Idea liself. That cannot be perma- 
 nently lost as long as there are human beings with 
 the instinct of freedom to assert itself sooner or 
 later, with the Christian instinct of fraternity to 
 demand for others what it claims for itself, with 
 the great fact of the one single image of God 
 which is in any one person as truly as in any 
 other, and with the words of Jesus forever ring- 
 ing in the ears of Christian people, “ Call no man 
 master on earth, for one is your Master, even 
 Christ.” The idea persists. 
 
 (2) But there must be advocates of that idea. 
 When people joined the church in order to be- 
 come Christians it is fair to say they did not be- 
 come Christians, except in limited numbers, for 
 that is not the way to become Christians, and 
 those actually did become so in spite of the wrong 
 way. Among those who were actual Christians 
 and not simply church-members, most of them 
 would get hold of the idea and some of them 
 would have the courage to speak out. Of course 
 they suffered more than ostracism. It meant 
 persecution and often death. 
 
 They propagated the idea in two ways. One 
 way was by agitation. They did it not for them- 
 selves alone, but for those who would deny them 
 their rights. Some of them were radical and 
 “one-ideaed,” as we sometimes say. Of course 
 
 [ 73 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 they were. Some did not have the idea whole, 
 but they had hold of it. They were wise enough 
 not to agitate for civil liberty, but only for their 
 religious rights. Some were far-sighted enough 
 to know that civil liberty would finally come as a 
 result, as a sort of by-product, we might say. 
 They knew that, if they once got the rulers to 
 recognize the rights of conscience, civil liberty 
 would become a fact, whatever the outward form 
 of government. They knew that if they advo- 
 cated a form of government corresponding to 
 the form of church polity which they held, they 
 would lose both battles, so they kept to the main 
 issue, knowing that, when hearts were changed. 
 and charged with fraternal love, right personal 
 and political relations would come mainly by vital 
 processes. ‘They were right. 
 
 The other way was by illuminating with their 
 personal lives as free men in Christ Jesus and 
 with their group life. 
 
 (3) A place where that idea would be allowed 
 to grow and work itself out was essential. We 
 have to remember that, wherever Christianity pre- 
 vailed in the whole world, it was a state religion 
 and used the arm of the law to prevent freedom 
 of worship, taxing all for the support of itself, 
 fining and imprisoning and torturing and mur- 
 dering those who dared to try to worship God as 
 their own consciences and the Bible directed. 
 That was the case almost everywhere, and those 
 agitators were driven on from place to piace and 
 from country to country. 
 
 [ 74] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 They lived in Italy, Switzerland (called Hel- 
 vetia), France, Germany, Spain, the British Isles, 
 Bohemia, Holland. That is, they tried to live in 
 those places. Whether it meant death or not, 
 they advocated that undying truth and suffered. 
 ‘During the fourth and fifth centuries,” to quote 
 again from Doctor Newman, 
 
 British Christians seem to have held aloof in a 
 measure from the paganizing influences in which the 
 continental church became involved. Diocesan Epis- 
 copacy seems not to have existed. The study of the 
 Scriptures was pursued with zeal in the numerous semi- 
 monastic colleges for the training of pastors and mis- 
 sionaries. An extensive and successful missionary work 
 was carried on in Ireland, Scotland, France, and Ger- 
 many. Human authority in matters of religion was 
 indignantly repudiated. Humility and simplicity in 
 Christian life were insisted upon, and the pomp and 
 worldliness of the Roman missionaries, who sought to 
 convert them, proved highly offensive. An example of 
 their missionary activity is the work of Patrick (A. D. 
 432 onward) who evangelized more or less thoroughly 
 the whole of Ireland and left a reputation for sanctity 
 of life and spiritual power that entitles him to be con- 
 sidered one of the greatest of missionaries. 
 
 Another Irish Christian was Columba, who, in 
 the sixth century, planted evangelical churches 
 throughout Scotland. Still another Irishman was 
 Columbanus, who, with thirteen companions, es- 
 tablished missions in Burgundy, Switzerland, and 
 Northern Italy. The work inaugurated by him 
 was carried into the Rhine Valley, Thuringia, 
 Bavaria, and Southeastern Germany. Ebrard 
 writes that there existed ‘a flourishing, well-or- 
 
 [75] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 ganized, Rome-free church whose only supreme 
 authority was the holy Scriptures, whose preach- 
 ing was the word of the free, redeeming grace of 
 God.” 
 
 The same writer goes on: 
 
 A simple, but well-organized church existed from the 
 Pyrenees to the Scheldt, from Chur to Utrecht, whose 
 only crime was that it did not recognize the Roman 
 Church as its supreme head; hence also knew no new 
 invocation of saints, no mass, no auricular confession 
 and the like and did not do homage to gross Pelagian- 
 ism but preached justification through faith. 
 
 Forster describes that church as “ recognizing 
 the Scriptures as its completely sufficient norm.” 
 Doctor Newman further says: 
 
 Notwithstanding the terrible persecutions to which 
 they were subjected during the seventh and following 
 centuries by the Saxon kings at the instigation of the 
 Roman Church, Christians of the ancient British type 
 are known to have maintained their existence in con- 
 siderable numbers, especially in Wales and Scotland, 
 until the eleventh century. It is probable that they 
 were never completely destroyed and that they reap- 
 peared in the Lollards of the fourteenth century. 
 
 These and other bodies of people had hold of 
 the distinctive, though not always in its whole- 
 ness; they released it and sent it on its way down 
 the centuries. 
 
 From the twelfth century on its advocates be- 
 came more constant, more coherent. About the 
 year 1173 Peter Waldo, a wealthy man of Lyons, 
 France, gave up his property and devoted him- 
 
 [ 76 | 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 self to preaching the gospel. He and his fol- 
 lowers established churches in France, Italy, Bo- 
 hemia, Southern Germany, and the southwestern 
 provinces of Austria. 
 
 There were sects called Taborites and Bohe- 
 mian Brethren and Moravians and Pickards, who 
 held the distinctive more or less whole. Peter 
 Chelcicky of Bohemia, the spiritual father of the 
 Bohemian Brethren, carried the doctrine of per- 
 sonal liberty farther than most others had done. 
 
 These bodies of Christians, who opposed the 
 union of Church and State on principle and not 
 simply in order to gain their own rights, were 
 the thinkers who brought on the Reformation of 
 the sixteenth century. Usually they were called 
 “nicknames ”’ by their enemies, from the names 
 of prominent leaders or the locations where they 
 carried on, or names indicating some peculiarity. 
 
 Many groups of them came to be called “ Re- 
 baptizers.” You readily see why. When a per- 
 son was converted through their agency and was 
 told of the requirement to follow Jesus in his 
 ordinance of baptism, but was informed he had 
 been baptized in infancy, his reply was that it 
 was something done to him and not by him, and 
 he must be baptized for himself. So their ene- 
 mies called the group by the Greek word “ Ana- 
 baptists,’’ which means “ Rebaptizers.”’ 
 
 These were the agitators who prepared the 
 way for Martin Luther, and they won his assent 
 to the fact of immersion as baptism and to the 
 wrongness of both infant baptism and the union 
 
 [77] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 of Church and State. But Luther had come 
 straight out of the heart of the Roman Church, 
 and his theology had much of Rome in it. Be- 
 sides, he was an autocrat by nature and by the 
 discipline of a church in which there were but 
 two classes, the ruling and the ruled classes, the 
 one above him that ruled him and the one below 
 whom he and his fellow priests were to rule. 
 These Anabaptists were the real thinkers of 
 the Reformation. When Luther came from the 
 Wartburg to Wittenburg and found that three 
 Anabaptists, Nicolas Storch, Max Sttbner, and 
 Thomas Munzer, had captured the intellects of 
 Cellarius and Carlstadt and even of Melancthon, 
 he was filled with rage and drove them off, saying 
 to Stibner, “God punish you, Satan.” That 
 swing from the clear thinking of the Anabaptists 
 to which he had really assented, drove him to ac- 
 cept infant baptism as a means of perpetuating 
 his church, for he was afraid to trust the gospel 
 alone, and it led him to retain connection with 
 the state in order that he might not lose the sup- 
 port of which he felt such great need. While he 
 said again and again that immersion alone was 
 baptism, he retained the two substitutes. He re- 
 tained the doctrine of Rome as to the Lord’s 
 Supper as a sacrament and not a symbol. Had 
 he accepted the distinctive whole and lived it there 
 would have been no State Church in the part of 
 Germany which he influenced and the place in 
 which the idea could be domesticated and thence 
 transplanted would have been secured therein. 
 
 [ 78 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 A new country must be found for it. God had 
 that country awaiting the eye and the foot of 
 man. He utilized the man best fitted of all the 
 men then living to find it and make it known. 
 That man knew nothing at all about the distinc- 
 tive, nor about the purpose of God in directing 
 him to this land. He was like other Catholics, 
 and the thought of religious liberty had never 
 penetrated his mind. He had reached the con- 
 clusion that the earth is round, and he had dreams 
 of finding India and China by this route and en- 
 joying all the luxuries of the Orient. He had 
 the traits for the adventure. When he had dis- 
 covered the land and made it known, his provi- 
 dential task was done. 
 
 The rulership of the land must not be entrusted 
 to those who could not plant that idea here. The 
 Latin races, with many admirable characteristics, 
 were all Roman Catholic, and they had not the 
 least conception of liberty of conscience. Al- 
 though the Baptists of England had been per- 
 secuted by their own countrymen, they belonged 
 to the one race which at that time was most 
 capable of being the guardian of the idea, the 
 Anglo-Saxon. God was directing. 
 
 There were three types of people who came 
 here from England at an early date, besides 
 smaller groups from Holland and Sweden and 
 France and other lands. 
 
 First were the early settlers of Virginia. They 
 were State Church people, members of the Es- 
 tablished Church. They were the Cavaliers, 
 
 [ 79 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 worldly and strangers to the idea of religious 
 liberty. They taxed all the people to support their 
 church and later, when our Baptist fathers claimed 
 the right to worship God as they were taught in 
 his Word, they fined them and whipped them, 
 and put them in prison. They punished those 
 who committed the crime of preaching the gospel 
 of Christ. James Madison, who had talked with 
 many Baptists of the principle of religious liberty, 
 wrote to a friend in ‘Philadelphia, 
 
 that diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution 
 rages among some, and to their eternal infamy the 
 clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such pur- 
 poses. There are at the present time, in the adjacent ~ 
 county, not less than five or six well-meaning men in 
 close jail for proclaiming their religious sentiments, 
 which are in the main quite orthodox. 
 
 That was in Virginia. God could not use that 
 group to plant the idea here, for they did not 
 have it. 
 
 A second group we call the Puritans. They 
 settled in Boston and Salem and were called Puri- 
 tans because they believed in a purer life than 
 prevailed in the Church of England. They did 
 not leave their church at first but came here with 
 the hope of establishing a purer type of Christian 
 life. They had no more idea of religious liberty 
 than the people they left behind in England. They 
 are the ones who hung witches and Quakers and 
 whipped Baptists and felt that in so doing they 
 were rendering distinguished and meritorious ser- 
 vice to God. Some one said of them that they 
 
 [ 80 | 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 came here to worship God according to the dic- 
 tates of their own consciences and to make every 
 body else do the same. ‘They were just as in- 
 tolerant of those who differed from them as were 
 their less religious brethren down in Virginia. 
 They were not Separatists when they came, 
 though many of them did separate from the 
 State Church after a while. They did not bring 
 the distinctive, did not have it to bring. 
 - A third group were the Pilgrim Fathers who 
 landed at Plymouth Rock in December, 1620. 
 They belonged to the Independents or Congrega- 
 tionalists who were known as Separatists in En- 
 gland, because they separated from the State 
 Church, and also Independents because they be- 
 lieved in the independent form of church govern- 
 ment. The term Puritan is sometimes applied 
 to them in a general way. They demanded abso- 
 lute religious liberty for themselves and were the 
 best people religiously who had come to this coun- 
 try, but did not have that distinctive, for they 
 united State and Church in an indissoluble pact, 
 taxed people of all faiths to support their church, 
 enforced their claims on all regardless of their 
 conscientious convictions, and required that a per- 
 son be a member of the church before he could 
 vote. In Connecticut, as late as 1833, the State 
 taxed the people as a whole, regardless of church 
 connections, to support the Church, and they did 
 the same in Massachusetts as late as 1834. 
 
 I select several instances from Nathaniel Mor- 
 ton’s “ Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers,” show- 
 
 [ 81 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 ing the spirit of the colonies both at Salem and 
 Plymouth. At Salem two non-conformist min- 
 isters, named Skelton and Higginson, came over 
 from England and were ordained August 6, 1629. 
 Mr. Higginson was instructed to draw up a con- 
 fession of faith and a covenant, and from it I 
 quote the following with a shudder: 
 
 And because they foresaw that this wilderness might 
 be looked upon as a place of liberty and therefore might 
 in time be troubled with erroneous spirits, therefore 
 they did put in one article into the confession of faith, 
 on purpose, about the duty and power of the magistrate 
 in matters of religion. 
 
 In other words, they intended to be in a posi- 
 tion to use the civil officers in dealing with any 
 one who should even express, much less act upon, 
 the conviction that America was a land of re- 
 ligious liberty. That was in Salem where we 
 have learned to expect such things. The same 
 year there came two brothers named Brown, one 
 a lawyer, the other a merchant, who insisted on 
 holding public services and using the Church of 
 England services from the Book of Common 
 Prayer. But the governor and council passed on 
 the matter and “ the governor told them that New 
 England was no place for such as they, and there- 
 fore he sent them back to England at the return 
 of the ship the same year;”’ in other words, sent 
 them back in the same ship that brought them. 
 
 Another instance seems laughable today. On 
 August 7, 1667, Rev. John Wilson, pastor of the 
 church in Boston, was on his death-bed and was 
 
 [ 82 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 asked by those who thought his judgment would 
 have special value as he saw the world recede 
 from him “ what he conceived to be those sins 
 amongst us which provoked the displeasure of 
 God against the country.” His reply was that 
 he had often thought the three sins were Separa- 
 tion, Anabaptism, and Korahism. The first he 
 did not explain, but probably he meant separa- 
 tion from the Church of England. By Anabap- 
 tism he said he meant “ for our neglect of bap- 
 tizing the children of the church I think God is 
 provoked by it.” By Korahism he meant that 
 the people would rise up and contradict their min- 
 isters and teachers. 
 
 The above three groups utterly failed to bring 
 the distinctive. Some one must bring it, if God’s 
 purpose was not to be thwarted. There was only 
 one group that had it whole and there was not 
 one of them among the Cavaliers or the Puritans 
 or the Pilgrims. 
 
 But wait. God is at work. It will come in an 
 unexpected way. 
 
 A new minister came to Boston. He was of 
 Welsh extraction and had been brought up in the 
 Established Church, but he had been listening to 
 those Anabaptists, by this time called Baptists. 
 He had begun to imbibe their great idea, but had 
 not yet separated himself from the church of his 
 childhood. When he came to Boston the people 
 thought they had captured the very best preacher 
 anywhere. But he began to release that idea in 
 his sermons and then they revised their original 
 
 [ 83 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 valuation of him. He was hardly as good a 
 preacher as they at first thought, for he hinted 
 that the police court of Boston had no right to 
 determine the conduct of church services or the 
 sermons of the ministers. That was shocking. 
 Presently he went up to Salem, where the big 
 
 idea came out stronger, and that made life still 
 
 more uncomfortable for him. Then he tried 
 Plymouth and was rebuked for that sort of 
 preaching. He went back to Salem, where he 
 became still more pronounced. He found that 
 the Puritans of Salem and Boston were just as 
 
 intolerant as was Archbishop Laud of England. 
 
 He saw that the union of Church and State was 
 unbiblical and unnatural, a perversion of the func- 
 tion of government, and an assault on the most 
 distinctive thing in human nature, the power and 
 right of choice. At first his revolt against both 
 the Puritan and Pilgrim churches was not so 
 much against their doctrines as against their prin- 
 ciple of a State Church with its essential denial 
 of the right of thought and choice and self-direc- 
 tion for every man. 
 
 His banishment from Salem was decided upon 
 by the court of “‘ prudent magistrates ” in Boston, 
 the charge against him being that he taught “ that 
 the magistrate ought not to punish the breach of 
 the first table otherwise than in such case as did 
 disturb the civil peace.” The “ first table ’’ meant 
 religious worship. 
 
 The decree of banishment continues, “‘ Where- 
 as Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the 
 
 [ 84 ] 
 
 ee 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 church of Salem, hath broached and divulged new 
 and dangerous opinions against the authority of 
 magistrates,’ as Morton says, “a disturber of the 
 peace both of the church and commonwealth.” 
 
 So this man was banished because he believed 
 and taught that no Church, or Church and State 
 combined, had the right to control a person in his 
 relations to and his dealings with his God. 
 
 Then that man decided to do a thing that 
 proved to be the greatest deed since the days of 
 the apostles, the one thing for which the groan- 
 ing centuries had been waiting, for which human- 
 ity, whether consciously or unconsciously, had 
 been longing, toward which God had been work- 
 ing for ages. After walking southward through 
 the deep snows, accompanied by a little group of 
 brave souls who felt the power of that newly dis- 
 covered distinctive, he bought a piece of land 
 from the Indians near Narragansett Bay, wrote a 
 constitution for the government of the people who 
 should live there, and put into that constitution a 
 clause that had never before in the history of the 
 world been written into any constitution for the 
 government of any people, and that clause said 
 that everybody should have the right under that 
 government to worship God according to his own 
 judgment, whether he was pagan, or Jew, or 
 Christian of any denomination, or member of no 
 church. They called that place which he had thus 
 preempted in the name of liberty by the gracious 
 name of “Providence.” They organized the 
 first Baptist church of ‘that city and of the 
 
 [ 85 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 nation. He and the original settlers entered into 
 a glorious compact which read thus: 3 
 
 We whose names are hereunder written, being de- 
 sirous to inhabit in the town of Providence, do promise 
 to submit ourselves in active and passive obedience to 
 all such orders or agencies as shall be made for the 
 public good of the body in an orderly way by the major 
 consent of the present inhabitants, masters of families, 
 incorporated into a township, and of such others whom 
 they shall admit into the same, only in civil things. 
 
 That was in March, 1638. The substance of 
 the contract was reaffirmed in another document 
 signed in 1640. The same principles were em- 
 bodied in the code of laws adopted by the colony. 
 in 1647 and finally incorporated in the Royal 
 Charter given by Charles II in 1663: 
 
 Our Royal will and pleasure is that no person within 
 the said colony at any time hereafter shall be in any 
 way molested, punished, disquieted, or called in ques- 
 tion for any differences of opinion in matters of re- 
 ligion and do not actually disturb the civil peace of the 
 said colony. 
 
 Thus, for the first time in the history of human- 
 ity, a state laid its corner-stone in the basic prin- 
 ciple of equal liberty for all. There had been at 
 times some toleration in European countries for 
 people holding different views from those of the 
 State Church, but toleration and liberty are two 
 distinct and essentially conflicting things. 
 
 When a memorial to Roger Williams was 
 placed in the national capitol in 1872, Senator 
 Anthony said: 
 
 [ 86 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 Roger Williams did not merely lay the foundations 
 of religious freedom; he constructed the whole edifice, 
 in all its impregnable strength and in all its imperish- 
 able beauty. Religious freedom, which now, by gen- 
 eral consent, underlies the foundation principles of civil- 
 ized government, was, at that time, looked upon as a 
 wilder theory than any proposition, moral, political, or 
 religious, that has since engaged the serious attention 
 of mankind. It was regarded as impracticable, disor- 
 ganizing, impious, and if not utterly subversive of social 
 order, it was not so, only because its manifest absurdity 
 would prevent any serious effort to enforce it. 
 
 There was one early instance of toleration in 
 this country that has been sometimes claimed as 
 religious liberty, but that is very far from the 
 truth. I read in the speech of a prominent man 
 who was a candidate for an eminent office that 
 the first instance of religious liberty in our coun- 
 try was in Maryland and in the Bill of Toleration 
 granted by Lord Baltimore, a Catholic, who 
 founded that province. 
 
 The claim is correct except in four particulars: 
 (1) Asto the time. That Bill of Toleration was 
 adopted in 1649 while Roger Williams wrote his 
 document in 1638, eleven years earlier. (2) As 
 to liberty. Lord Baltimore granted toleration, 
 not liberty. He bestowed it, but neither he nor 
 any one else could bestow liberty. They could 
 recognize it as an inalienable right which no man 
 on earth could give. (3) Lord Baltimore did it 
 under compulsion, Williams recognized it as 
 each man’s right. Lord Baltimore’s people were 
 Catholics but lived under a Protestant govern- 
 
 [ 87 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 ment, and would not have been allowed by that 
 government to deny one of its Protestant prov- 
 inces their right of worship. With Williams and 
 his friends it was a matter of conviction that all 
 men had that right, and he acted on the principle 
 of eternal right. (4) Lord Baltimore belonged to 
 a Church that had never in a single instance recog- 
 nized that people had such a thing as the inborn 
 right to liberty of worship. That church was the 
 State Church in most of the nations of Europe 
 till that union was broken in several countries, as 
 Germany, England, Sweden, Holland, etc., and 
 Catholic countries had never taken advantage of» 
 any one of their many opportunities to recognize 
 that people could worship God as they thought 
 best. The Catholic Church did not even grant 
 that toleration in Maryland, but one of its mem- 
 bers, under compulsion of England, gave tolera- 
 tion instead of liberty. It would have used Lord 
 Baltimore to set up a State Church, prisons, 
 thumscrews, racks, and all, if it had been allowed, 
 while Williams and his friends belonged to a 
 church whose very nature compelled it to act as 
 he did and whose history had been one prolonged 
 effort to procure and secure religious liberty not 
 for themselves alone but for all, even for those 
 who, if they had had the power, would have | 
 denied it to them. 
 
 The Catholics could no more recognize the free- 
 dom of the soul than could Baptists deny it. It is 
 of the nature and structure of their organization. 
 To recognize it would be to destroy the whole 
 
 [ 88 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 system. They say that the Church, through its 
 officials, can forgive sins, can deny salvation to 
 any one, and has the right to rule the souls of all 
 men as God’s vice-gerent, vice-ruler. When the 
 pope speaks “ex cathedra,’ he cannot make a 
 mistake, because the Holy Spirit will not allow it, 
 and the faithful must accept what he says as a 
 deliverance from God. If they do not, they are 
 not the faithful, but reprobates to be punished for 
 not surrendering their divinely given right to 
 deal personally with their God and Father. 
 
 Take a few quotations from Catholic author- 
 ities : 
 
 We do, on the part of Almighty God, Father, Son, 
 and Holy Spirit, and also by the authority of the 
 Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own, ex- 
 communicate and curse all Hussites, Wicliffites, Luther- 
 ans, Zwinglians, Calvinists, Huguenots, Anabaptists, 
 Trinitarians and Apostates from Christ, and all and 
 Sundry other heretics, by whatsoever name they are 
 reckoned, and of whatsoever sect they may be, and 
 their receivers, aiders, and abettors and in general all 
 their defenders whatsoever, and those who without our 
 authority and that of the Apostolic See knowingly read 
 or retain or print or in any way defend the books con- 
 taining their heresy or treating of religion (Extract 
 from Bull in Coena Domini, by Pope Paul V). 
 
 The above is published in Rome every year on 
 Maundy Thursday. 
 The bishop takes this oath: 
 
 To the utmost of my power I will persecute and 
 attack heretics, schismatics, and rebels against our lord 
 (the Pope), and his aforesaid successors. 
 
 [ 89 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 Canons IX and X, Council of Trent, say, 
 
 If any one shall say that sacramental absolution by a 
 priest is not a judicial act, but a mere ministry ... even 
 though the priest should not absolve seriously but in a 
 joke, let him be accursed. 
 
 Extract from creed of Pope Pius IV: 
 
 I likewise admit the Holy Scriptures according to 
 that sense which our Holy Mother, the Church, has 
 held and does hold, whose province it is to judge of the 
 true sense and interpretation of Holy Scripture... 
 Whatsoever is condemned by the Church I, in like man- 
 ner, condemn, reject and anathematize. 
 
 To the same effect speak Canones et Decrett 
 Concilit Tridentini, and the authoritative Cat- 
 echism of Council of Trent, ‘ Faith of Our 
 Fathers,” by Cardinal Gibbons, and scores of 
 others. | 
 
 To the above quotations I add a confirming 
 word by the scintillating Papini, an Italian Cath- 
 olic layman, who wrote a brilliant and erratic 
 “Life of Christ ’’ several years ago. 
 
 Protesting against the work of Protestants 
 among the Italians he says: 
 
 Leave us under the tyranny of the Pope; it is a 
 tyranny established by Christ, the tyranny of a father, 
 and we prefer it infinitely to the tyranny of pastors, of 
 quacks, of consistories, and of books. We “savages,” 
 we medievalists still hold to the bull Unam Sanctam, 
 which says: “ We assert, declare, define, and pronounce 
 that for every human creature to be subject to the 
 Roman Pontiff is absolutely necessary to salvation.” 
 We demand but little, only one thing: that you subscribe 
 
 [ 90 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 with us to the documents issued from the Vatican dur- 
 ing the past seventy years, from the Syllabus of Pius X 
 to the encyclical Ubi arcano Dei of Pius XI inclusive. 
 
 The spread of religious liberty to the other 
 States and its final adoption into the Constitution 
 of the United States is a story of thrilling hero- 
 ism on the part of our Baptist fathers. 
 
 Several instances of the inhumanity with which 
 they were treated by State Churches must be 
 given in order to set forth the facts of history 
 clearly. One is the case of Henry Dunstan, the 
 first president of Harvard University. I quote 
 from Dr. Henry C. Vedder’s “ A Short History 
 of the Baptists,” p. 197: 
 
 For preaching against infant baptism this learned, 
 godly, and zealous man was indicted by the Grand Jury, 
 condemned to suffer a public admonition, and placed 
 under bonds for good behavior, finally being compelled 
 to resign the presidency of the college of which he had 
 been the greatest benefactor. Shortly afterward he 
 was arraigned for refusing to have his child baptized 
 but was saved from further persecution by his death. 
 
 Another instance was that of John Clarke, who 
 founded the First Baptist Church of Newport, 
 and Obadiah Holmes, and I quote again from 
 Doctor Vedder: 
 
 While they were spending the Lord’s Day with a 
 brother who lived near Lynn it was concluded to have 
 religious services in the house. Two constables broke 
 in while Mr. Clarke was preaching from Revelation 
 3: 10, and the men were haled before the court. For 
 this offense they were sentenced to pay, Clarke a fine 
 
 [91 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 of twenty pounds and Holmes one of thirty pounds, in 
 default of which they were to be “well whipped.” A 
 friend paid Clarke’s fine and he was set at liberty, 
 whether he would or not, but Holmes was “ whipped 
 unmercifully ’ (the phrase is Bancroft’s) in the streets 
 of Boston for the atrocious crime of preaching the 
 gospel and of adding thereto the denial of infant bap- 
 tism. 
 
 But just before the lash was laid upon Holmes he 
 said to the bystanders, “Good people all, I am now 
 about to be baptized with the baptism of affliction that 
 so I may have fellowship with my Lord.” 
 
 The way the great distinctive spread from | 
 Rhode Island into the Constitution of the United 
 States and the constitutions of the several States, 
 one by one, is a fascinating study. It should be 
 noted that the Constitution of the United States, 
 as originally adopted, did not forbid the union of 
 Church and State, said nothing about it. Our 
 Baptist forefathers knew there was danger lurk- 
 ing in that silence, but they supported George 
 Washington and the other leaders who with very 
 great difficulty secured its adoption by the thirteen 
 States. But there was one thing in the Constitu- 
 tion which gave them hope. That was the method 
 which the document provided for its own amend- 
 ment. They said to each other, “ We will adopt 
 it and then amend it.” So, at once, they won 
 the aid of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and 
 other men of balanced judgment in getting the 
 First Amendment to the national Constitution 
 passed. This brief but meaningful safeguard of 
 religious liberty reads as follows: 
 
 [92] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 Congress shall make no law regarding the establish- 
 ment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. 
 
 The States took it up, one by one later, and 
 
 wrote the equivalent of it into their constitutions, 
 Connecticut retaining the old régime of taxing 
 all people for the support of the Congregational 
 church till 1833, and Massachusetts till 1834. 
 At last the distinctive had found a place where 
 it could be domesticated and grow, and whence it 
 could spread into all the world, as it is doing 
 now. ‘Through all the centuries it had been at 
 work on the Continent of Europe and in En- 
 gland, producing great epochs, making great men 
 and women, and bringing on world movements 
 whose significance can only now be clearly dis- 
 cerned. : 
 
 We are glad that the agency of Baptists, under 
 the providence of God, in securing soul liberty 
 for mankind is universally and generously recog- 
 nized by students of history and of the science of 
 government. 
 
 Masson in his life of Milton wrote: 
 
 Not to the Church of England, nor to Scottish Pres- 
 byterians, nor to English Puritanism at large, does the 
 honor of the first perception of the full principle of 
 liberty of conscience and its first assertion in English 
 speech belong. That honor has to be assigned, I believe, 
 to the Independents generally and the Baptists in par- 
 ticular. 
 
 John Locke the philosopher says, “ Baptists 
 _ were the first and only promoters of absolute 
 
 [93 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 liberty—just and true liberty, equal and impar- 
 tial a 
 
 Stoughton, in his ecclesiastical history of En- 
 gland, says that to the Baptists “belongs the 
 honor of presenting in this country the first dis- 
 tinct and broad plea for liberty of conscience.” 
 
 George Bancroft, in his “ History of the United 
 States,’ writes, “‘ Freedom of conscience, un- 
 limited freedom of mind, was, from the first, the 
 trophy of the Baptists.” 
 
 In discussing the achievement of bringing about 
 the complete separation of Church and State, - 
 Leonard Woolsey Bacon, a Congregationalist, 
 says: 
 
 So far as this work was a work of intelligent convic- 
 tion and religious faith, the chief honor of it must be 
 given to the Baptists. Other sects, notably the Presby- 
 terians, had been energetic and efficient in demanding 
 their own liberties; the Friends and the Baptists agreed 
 in demanding liberty of conscience and worship and 
 equality before the law for all alike. But the active 
 labor in this cause was mainly done by the Baptists. 
 It is to their consistency and constancy in the warfare 
 against the privileges of the powerful “ Standing 
 Order” of New England and of the moribund estab- 
 lishment of the South that we are chiefly indebted for 
 the final triumph in this country of that principle of 
 the separation of Church and State which is one of 
 the largest contributions in the world to civilization and 
 to the church universal. 
 
 From America that distinctive is spreading by 
 normal processes to the other nations. State 
 Churches will soon be a troubled memory of by- 
 
 [ 94 ] 
 
The Baptist Distinctive 
 
 
 
 gone ages and all will wonder that people profess- 
 ing to be Christians could ever have consented to 
 pervert government and violate the soul’s func- 
 tions in that way. Let us thank God that our 
 denomination has been God’s chosen agent in 
 making that unspeakable gift to mankind, and 
 then let us ask what is the next step we are ap- 
 pointed to take as the possessors and advocates 
 of that invaluable distinctive. 
 
 [95] 
 
VI 
 THE BAPTIST OBJECTIVE 
 
 Now what is our Objective, the goal toward 
 which we have been traveling along the pathway 
 of our distinctive? 
 
 It is simple, unmistakably clear, and inescapa- 
 bly imperative. That goal is nothing less than 
 seeing the whole world in possession of that dis-— 
 tinctive whole, not a part of the world in pos- 
 
 session of it whole, nor the whole world in. 
 
 possession of it in part, but the whole world 
 in possession of it whole. 
 
 1. Why Pursue This Objective 
 
 There are six reasons why we must do it. 
 
 (1) That the distinctive exists, not as an in- 
 teresting and valuable possession of a group, but 
 as one of the necessaries of human life. The 
 whole world must have it whole because the 
 wholeness of the world is impossible without it. 
 Mankind was made for it, and it exists for man- 
 kind. Some one must give it to the whole race, 
 and evidently the body of people who now have it 
 whole and have had the responsibility of giving 
 it its present vogue, is the very body of people 
 to continue that task until it is done. If they do 
 not, God will be under the necessity of raising 
 up some other body to take the task from our 
 
 [ 96 | 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 faithless hands. How much of the world does 
 not have it now? All who have not the gospel of 
 Christ, and that means nearly a billion people. 
 That is a wide and fascinating field for our en- 
 deavor. Even among those who have had the 
 gospel, if there is a group that is a State Church 
 elsewhere, they have not the idea whole; if there 
 is any practising baptism as a means of salvation 
 of old or young, they have it not; if any use the 
 two substitutes which grew out of the supersti- 
 tion that baptism is essential to salvation, or if 
 they baptize babies, or if they are under an over- 
 head control instead of practising the original 
 autonomy of the local church, they do not have 
 it whole, even though they may have much of 
 the very gospel itself. No, the world is not yet in 
 possession of it by any means. And the integrity, 
 the wholeness, of the world requires that we or 
 some other body shall put it in possession of 
 this distinctive. 
 
 (2) The wholeness of the gospel requires that 
 we do that very thing. It is an integral part of 
 the gospel. You cannot take out Christ’s words, 
 “Call no man master on earth, for one is your 
 Master, even Christ,” and leave the gospel whole. 
 That also requires missions. We must be the 
 most missionary body of people on earth. God 
 seems to have made a special ruling that the 
 gospel should go to the heathen nations with that 
 essential in it, for did he not start modern mis- 
 sions through William Carey, who was the first 
 to take the gospel to India’s teeming millions? 
 
 [97 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 And did he not inaugurate foreign missions by 
 Americans through Adoniram Judson who, 
 though brought up in another faith, was led to 
 accept the Baptist distinctive while reading his 
 Bible on board the ship in which he was sailing 
 to Burma, so that he had to change church afhlia- 
 tions at once and then arouse our people to or- 
 ganize a missionary society to support the work? 
 Can we think of it in any other way than that 
 God wanted the gospel with that integral idea in 
 it at the start in India and Burma? 
 
 (3) Lhe wholeness of Jesus’ purpose, which is 
 God’s purpose, for mankind requires that they 
 have this distinctive whole. As some one has 
 analyzed it, his purpose for the world religiously 
 is a world of worshipers and doers of the Father's 
 will; politically, a world of equals; socially, a 
 world of brothers; industrially, a world of co- 
 laborers and comrades. That is impossible with- 
 out our distinctive, by whomsoever it may be be- 
 stowed upon the world. The world situation at 
 this very moment is calling mutely but insistently 
 for that reign of Christ. The cure for the ills of 
 our modern life is Christ, and Christ is impos- 
 sible without the thing that he requires, namely, 
 that people have him alone as Master and have 
 each other as brothers—“ all ye are brethren.” 
 
 (4) The wholeness of our commission requires 
 that we do so. A commission takes account of 
 the things essential in it and the time required to 
 perform it. We have procured and apparently 
 secured certain rights for the world at large, in- 
 
 [ 98 ] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 cluding ourselves and those who at first were un- 
 willing to grant us our rights, but the inclusive 
 work is not yet done, and the time for which our 
 commissions was given us is not all spent. 
 
 (5) Lhe wholeness of other Christian bodies 
 who are doing great, constructive work for the 
 world demands that we bestow this distinctive 
 on them. We have had discussions and contro- 
 versies with them in order to win triumphs over 
 them, but we must now approach them as brothers 
 with something to bestow on them which we 
 have found to have special value. We may tell 
 them how much of a blessing it has all been to 
 us, and that we wish them to have the benefit of 
 it. Our purpose and spirit must be Christly. 
 Those bodies that allow the ideas and ceremonies 
 which came in with the several interferences with 
 that distinctive, need it. It would add to their 
 already great value to the world. 
 
 (6) But I now come to the very greatest of 
 all the reasons for bestowing this distinctive in 
 its wholeness upon the whole world, and that is 
 that the wholeness of Christianity depends on it. 
 When I speak of a whole Christianity I mean a 
 united or a reunited Christendom. And by a re- 
 united Christendom I mean that union of all the 
 forces of Christianity in one great body for which 
 we all pray and many hope. 
 
 There are several things necessary if we are 
 ever to have church union. 
 
 First of all, we must recognize the fact that we 
 ‘now have Christian unity. All Christians are one 
 
 [99 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 in Christ by virtue of being in Christ and not by 
 virtue of being in any one church or in a com- 
 bined church. If you were born again in the 
 heart of Africa and had never heard of any other 
 Christian than the one who brought you to Christ, 
 you would be one with all other Christians be- 
 cause you would sustain exactly the same essential 
 relation to Christ and other Christians that you 
 would sustain if you knew a very large number of 
 them and were active in all the great enterprises 
 of the kingdom of Christ. | 
 
 There are three tremendous figures of speech 
 which show Christ’s relation to his disciples: He 
 the vine and they the branches vitally connected 
 with him and with each other; he the head, and 
 they the body, all members not only of him but of 
 each other; he the chief corner-stone, and they 
 living stones laid down on him and all growing 
 together and constituting the glorious temple of 
 a redeemed humanity. As soon as any one is a 
 Christian he automatically becomes a member of 
 Christ and of the other Christians. 
 
 So Christian unity is a fact because there are 
 Christians. Yet many people are saying that 
 Christ’s prayer to the Father that they may all 
 be one is kept from being answered by the re- 
 fusal of people to get into one great church, usu- 
 ally the church to which those particular people 
 belong. There is unity now, for unity is of the 
 spirit, union of the letter; unity is internal and 
 vital, while union is external and more or less 
 mechanical; unity is involuntary and a matter of 
 
 [ 100 ] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 the vital breath, while union is voluntary and a 
 matter of arrangement. To be sure, union must 
 be a matter of thought and of loyalty to Christ, 
 but it is not Christian unity and can only come 
 where there is real unity of spirit. 
 
 Secondly, we must recognize the fact that we 
 now have much Christian and church cooperation. 
 The Federation of Churches is often a useful 
 thing. It enables churches to work together in 
 general and special activities and to reenforce 
 each other. It has rectified some of its earlier 
 mistakes. Some of its workers used to feel called 
 on to become propagandists for church union 
 without regard to the autonomy of the groups 
 working together. But it may serve a fine pur- 
 pose. There are other forms of interdenomina- 
 tional fellowship and cooperation which are valu- 
 able. Let us thank God for them and keep on 
 erowing together. | 
 
 Thirdly, there can be no church union on known 
 departures from the teachings of our Guide-book. 
 Go back and carefully note the five respects in 
 which the great distinctive has been interfered 
 with, and ask yourself the question, how one who 
 recognizes all the facts of the case can deliberately 
 go into a union which endorses those violations 
 of the teachings of the Word and of the essential 
 functions of human nature. 
 
 To be a bit more specific, here are several ques- 
 tions that must be settled by the coalescing bodies : 
 _ The question of church polity will have to be 
 decided on. There are three general types of 
 
 [ 101 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 church government to be found. One is the pre- 
 latical. It is based chiefly on the office of bishop. 
 In the New Testament there are three words 
 which designate what we call the ministry, 
 “bishop” “elder,” and “ pastor,’ though they 
 indicate different phases of that multiform re- 
 lationship. That the words bishop and elder were 
 used of the same office is clear from Paul’s letter 
 to Titus (1: 5-7) to appoint “elders in every 
 city...if any man is blameless... for the bishop 
 must be blameless as God’s steward;” and in. 
 Peter’s First Epistle, fifth chapter, in which he 
 exhorts the elders and says he is their fellow elder 
 and in effect calls them pastors, which means 
 shepherds of the flock. The Greek word epis- 
 copos, translated “ bishop,’ means overseer and 
 refers to the executive work of the minister; the 
 Greek word presbuteros means “elder” and 
 refers to the advisory and instructive work of the 
 minister; the word poimen, translated “ pastor,” 
 means ‘shepherd,’ and refers to the personal 
 care which the minister is to bestow on the people 
 who are his flock. The three words support and 
 complete each other and indicate the manifold 
 nature of the minister’s relationships and minis- 
 try. Doctor Lightfoot, of the Church of Eng- 
 land, proves by careful interpretation of the 
 Scriptures that the two words, bishop and elder, 
 designated one and the same office in the New 
 Testament. 
 
 By the prelatical type of church government I 
 mean the episcopal. It is called prelatical, which 
 
 [ 102 ] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 is the Latin word for “ preferred,’’ because there 
 was one preferred group, and that was the minis- 
 try, not in its wholeness as composed of bishop 
 (overseer), elder, and shepherd, but in its single 
 phase of overseership. That overhead control 
 varies from the perfect autocracy of the Roman 
 Catholic Church, in which the officers claim to 
 speak and act as rulers in God’s place, to the 
 most democratic form of it in the Methodist 
 Church, where the overhead control is at its low- 
 est, though it is there. 
 
 Shall the united church have that form of 
 organization? If so, we cannot retain our dis- 
 tinctive whole. 
 
 A second form of polity is the presbyterial, 
 which is built upon the eldership and has far less 
 of the overhead control than has the episcopal 
 type. Shall the united church have that form 
 of government? If so, our distinctive cannot be 
 maintained whole. 
 
 The third form of government is the congrega- 
 tional, in which the authority resides entirely in 
 the people composing the local group, not coming 
 down from an overhead body but arising from the 
 constituting body, a real democracy of soul. If 
 one individual has as much inherent right to deal 
 personally with God and direct his own life as 
 any other individual, so one group has as much 
 inherent right as any other group and cannot, in 
 the nature of life itself, both natural and Chris- 
 tian, be under the control of any other group or 
 set of men. That must be regarded as settled. 
 
 [ 103 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 The relation of the various groups to each other 
 is that of voluntary cooperation in extending the 
 kingdom of Christ over mankind. Does any 
 “church union” involve the surrender of that 
 basic and vital principle? Then we should lose 
 our distinctive, and some one would have to re- 
 cover and reestablish it. 
 
 A second question that will have to be settled 
 in the united church is that of the initial cere- 
 mony. Shall it be baptism or the substitutes that 
 owe their origin to the superstition that baptism 
 is a saving rather than a symbolical ordinance, 
 or shall it be all three? We could not interfere 
 with the freedom of any group to use those sub- 
 stitutes if they so wish, but we cannot make use 
 of them or endorse the use of them in the church 
 to which we should belong. This position is not 
 a matter of prejudice, but of principle. If we 
 surrender, we do not surrender baptism but the 
 distinctive that lies back of it and requires it. 
 
 A third question: Who shall be baptized and 
 become members of the composite church, pro- 
 fessed believers, or babes, or both? Even though 
 we may not consider baptism as a means of sav- 
 ing the babies we shall not accept that interfer- 
 ence with the working of our universal distinc- 
 tive. Only one who has personally died to sin 
 and risen to a new life can obey Christ in the 
 ordinance which assumes and declares that. I 
 once baptized a young man who was not converted 
 at the time. Soon afterward he saw his mistake, 
 accepted Christ and was baptized again. But the 
 
 [ 104 ] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 first time it was not the burial of a dead man, a 
 man who had died to sin, nor was it the resurrec- 
 tion of a living man, but of one still dead in sin. 
 No one who was immersed before becoming an 
 actual Christian has been baptized in reality 
 though he has been in form. 
 
 The propagation of this principle 1s an essential 
 move in the direction of church union, an end 
 most ardently desired by many people. 
 
 A fourth question must be faced, and that is 
 the question of the Lord’s Supper. There are 
 several views of that wonderful memorial. 
 
 First is the view that the bread and wine are 
 changed by the blessing of the minister into the 
 actual, literal body and blood of Jesus. That view 
 was developed by the Church of Rome and is 
 called transubstantiation, meaning a change of 
 substance. It is one of the reasons why the priest 
 drinks the wine, for it would not do to lose a 
 single drop of that precious blood, as might hap- 
 pen when passing it around among the people, 
 while the people eat the bread. Shall the com- 
 posite church accept that view? If they do, our 
 distinctive is gone. 
 
 There is a second view called consubstantia- 
 tion. Martin Luther invented this. He denied 
 that the bread and wine were changed into the 
 veritable, literal body and blood of Jesus, but 
 affirmed his “ real presence ’’ there, ‘‘ in, with, and 
 under the bread and wine,” and that it was a 
 -means of grace, because you actually partook of 
 him. When told that Christ was only at the right 
 
 £105 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 hand of God he replied that the right hand of 
 God was everywhere. If we adopt this view, that 
 Christ exists “ along with ” the substance, we sur- 
 render our distinctive. 
 
 A third view is the sacramental, that the ordi- 
 nances are channels of grace. This is held by the 
 Church of England. All these forms are really 
 due to a sort of sacerdotalism, the existence of 
 a sacred order in whom the church really centers, 
 so that the church practically means the officials. 
 Everything is created by the apostles and their 
 successors, so the argument runs; the priest is 
 ordained by them; without the priest there can be 
 no full worship of God; the sacraments, baptism 
 and the Lord’s Supper, are the means that must 
 create and maintain the spiritual life. The Epis- 
 copal Church says baptism is “the great sacra- 
 ment of our regeneration,’ and the Supper, or 
 Eucharist, as they call it, is termed “our chief 
 means of communion with our Lord. Dr. R. J. 
 Campbell puts it thus: 
 
 The incarnation, the atonement, the extension of both 
 in the sacraments, the ministry which guards them and 
 the visible society itself as the sphere of sacrificial grace, 
 all these seem to me to imply each other. 
 
 John Calvin taught a modified view that, while 
 the bread and wine are signs of the body and 
 blood of Christ, they are the instrumental means 
 of his presence and the Supper is therefore a 
 means of grace. 
 
 Zwingli was nearer the truth in saying that the 
 Supper is a memorial or remembrance of the 
 
 [ 106 ] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 sacrifice for sins offered once for all by Christ, 
 and that it is not a continuation or repetition of 
 the original sacrifice of Christ as taught by the 
 Roman Church and by others in the modified ways 
 I have pointed out; but Zwingli did not grasp the 
 idea fully. 
 
 _ The true view is that it is a symbol, purely 
 that, nothing more, just as baptism is a symbol, 
 baptism symbolizing the emergence of the new 
 life out of death and the Supper symbolizing the 
 feeding of that new life on Christ “ who is our 
 life,’ who said he was the bread of life “ that 
 came down from heaven.” When he said, ‘‘ This 
 is my body,” “‘ This is my blood,’ he used a 
 metaphor, which is an unexpanded simile. If he 
 had said, “ This is like my body,” etc., it would 
 have been a simile, which is an expanded meta- 
 phor, and would have meant precisely the same 
 thing. 
 
 The other views that I have indicated, are not 
 only foreign to the Scriptures but to the basic 
 ideas of life and grace. To make the ordinances 
 channels through which God’s grace can flow 
 to us “limits the universality of divine grace,” 
 as Doctor Fairbairn points out. 
 
 The Supper is an object-lesson. It helps you 
 to form a mental picture of the Christ in giving 
 himself for your redemption and nourishment. It 
 enshrines that truth, keeps it clear in the mind, 
 _ appeals to the heart’s gratitude and devotion and 
 stimulates the desire to be more worthy of it all. 
 The soul grows hungry and thirsty in your activ- 
 
 [ 107 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 ities and that drives you to him, so that this ob- 
 ject-lesson makes it all vivid. 
 
 Shall we take the transubstantiation or con- 
 substantiation or the sacramental view, or shall 
 we have the simple, clear, and common-sense truth 
 as taught inthe Word? That matter will have to 
 be settled if we have a composite church. No 
 question is ever settled at all until it is settled 
 aright. To surrender the truth that it is a symbol, 
 an object-lesson, a sort of keepsake, is to initiate | 
 a process that will destroy our distinctive and 
 necessitate its recovery and reinstatement in the 
 world by some other body of people. 
 
 2. Difficulties in the Way 
 
 There are obstinate dificulties in the way of 
 our success, some to be found within our own 
 body, some without. 
 
 (1) Lhe Outside Diticulties. If we get our 
 distinctive accepted by the whole world it will 
 be through their voluntary acceptance of it, not 
 under any sort of compulsion, for we are not able 
 to use compulsion, we have none to use, and com- 
 pulsion of others would destroy the distinctive. 
 To accept this would require the abandonment by 
 them of what now stands in the way of it. Here 
 are some things that stand in the way: 
 
 Habit for one thing. After practising the two 
 substitutes for baptism and practising infant bap- 
 tism for centuries no church will find it an easy 
 task to change its habits. 
 
 Tradition is another difficulty. The ideas and 
 
 [ 108 ] 
 
 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 practises of the denominations have been handed 
 down through generations and, in some instances, 
 for centuries, and tradition has its influence over 
 us all. 
 
 Prejudice stands in the way, and it does not 
 characterize one group alone, but we all have it. 
 ‘The conflicts of the past generated prejudices, and 
 the echoes of those stormy days salute the eager 
 ear even now. We may deny to each other the 
 respect and fraternal regard to which all true 
 Christians are entitled, and we may wrongly ques- 
 tion each other’s sincerity. We may find it dif- 
 ficult to go to them in the right spirit, and they 
 may not always receive our approaches in the 
 most loving way, because of prejudices growing 
 out of the past and out of misrepresentations 
 made on both sides. 
 
 Another difficulty is the spirit of controversy 
 rather than of counsel, of conflict rather than of 
 cooperation. Whatever we do in trying to put 
 others in possession of the distinctive we must 
 do as friends and not as foes, in the spirit of 
 comity and not of conflict, with the desire to pro- 
 mote truth rather than to win a triumph. 
 
 Still another difficulty, already implied, is found 
 in imstitutions and organizations that have been 
 constructed on principles in vital conflict with our 
 distinctive and whose very existence depends on 
 forbidding their devotees to receive this distinc- 
 _ tive or even investigate it. Such institutions re- 
 quire the “ closed mind ”’ in their adherents. The 
 historic, gigantic instance of this is the Church 
 
 [ 109 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 of Rome. The powers that brought about the in- 
 terferences with the working of our distinctive 
 are the powers that brought into its development 
 the Catholic Church. Built upon those perver- 
 sions of the New Testament church it has through 
 the centuries perpetuated them by union with the 
 State, wherever that has been possible, and has 
 never yet dissolved that unholy union except 
 under compulsion. That Church is not suscep- 
 tible to change, but many individuals within its © 
 ranks may be brought to see and receive the dis- 
 tinctive. Many of its devotees are simple-minded 
 and conscientious, but its essential structure 
 makes its own reformation and its reconstruction 
 on a Biblical and gospel pattern apparently im- 
 possible. 
 
 There are other tyrannies that require the 
 “closed mind,” and they erect almost insuperable 
 barriers against any approach to their people with 
 this truth. But there is a way to meet it. We 
 may so saturate the public mind with the truth 
 as to lessen the success of their propaganda, and 
 we may win numberless individuals among them. 
 
 Another difficulty is the prevailing feeling 
 against the preaching of “ doctrine.’ “ Doctrinal 
 preaching ” is very much disliked. But two things 
 may be said. One is that a “ doctrine ”’ is a teach- 
 ing, and teaching is always in order. Besides, 
 doctrine should be lived in such a way as to im- 
 press people that it is vital rather than merely 
 “doctrinaire.” The prejudice is not: so much 
 against a teaching as against what is called “ theo- 
 
 [110] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 logical’ teaching in technical terms. We have 
 had enough of these terms. Let us away with 
 them. The “common people” are glad to hear 
 the truth I am speaking of when told in a straight- 
 forward way. They wonder why we do not do 
 more of it. 
 
 (2) Here are some of the Dificulties we find 
 Within Our Own Body, besides the prejudices 
 I have alluded to and the feelings left by the old 
 experiences of controversy: 
 
 a. After centuries of struggle with other re- 
 ligious bodies over our right and the right of all 
 men to have complete religious liberty, we are 
 glad to rest and be “ at ease in Zion.” But it may 
 be said that there are sleepless enemies of that 
 truth, and they are now at work in an effort to 
 control sacred interests in every country. 
 
 b. After a high degree of success in bestowing 
 the distinctive on our North American Continent, 
 and seeing it spread over the world, and seeing 
 State Churches give way before it, we may feel 
 that others have it in such degree that they will 
 not need any further aid from us. But already 
 I have pointed out that the idea in its wholeness 
 is not in possession of any other strong body 
 of people, and perhaps a billion people know 
 strictly nothing at all about it. 
 
 c. There is a very reasonable desire on our part 
 to enter more deeply into Christian fellowship 
 _ and cooperation with all Christians and show 
 them that we are more than mere fighters and 
 wranglers, that we are their colaborers and com- 
 
 [111] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 rades. The result of that is a silence on the sub- 
 ject of the distinctive which is unfaithfulness to 
 it, and which is a surprise to all who come to 
 learn how vital and fascinating it is. If we 
 continue to prize laziness above loyalty, fellow- 
 ship with others above fidelity to them, our un- 
 finished task will be taken out of our hands and 
 given to others. The truth is, we ourselves have 
 been saying so little about it our own people are 
 not informed on the subject, and our friends of 
 other churches are surprised at learning what it 
 is, surprised at the simple and common-sense and 
 fascinating character of it, and surprised at us 
 for our silence about such a remarkable and vital 
 matter. Weare forming habits of fatal reticence 
 on that particular subject that it will be difficult 
 to break up. | 
 
 d. A fourth difficulty is the presence of prob- 
 lems among us which sometimes bulk large and 
 seem formidable. But a problem is a sign of life. 
 Some one has said that youth is rich in unsolved 
 problems, and they constitute its charm and its 
 promise. When any one ceases to have problems 
 he is dead, though he may not know it. Ours 
 are the problems that always grow out of a de- 
 mocracy, and are integral in a spiritual democ- 
 racy. Here are some of them: | 
 
 (a) The problem of liberty and leadership. 
 The primary need of any cause is leaders. But, 
 when leadership becomes drivership or rulership, 
 it lessens the liberty of the individual who is 
 ruled. Yet, in spite of its perils, leadership is 
 
 [112] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 essential. An autocracy can do fairly well with- 
 out leaders, for it centers in a ruling family or 
 in institutions with fixed habits and traditions 
 that hold the subjects under control and get re- 
 sults. Our churches are not carried to success 
 by autocratic officials, or by an infallible institu- 
 tion, or by mystical ceremonies and ritual, but by 
 leaders chosen by the people themselves, who in 
 turn hold the leaders responsible to them, their 
 equals and the source of their power. We have 
 the double problem of discovering them, then of 
 preparing and following them. We: face the 
 manifold danger of failing to secure such leader- 
 ship, or of allowing it to become tyranny or of 
 failing to follow it. Those perils have made us 
 the more watchful. We have always had capa- 
 ble leaders, and we shall always be under the 
 necessity of praying for and utilizing them. 
 
 (b) Democracy and discipline has always been 
 one of our problems. All discipline is self-dis- 
 cipline. We debate and express our individual 
 views, as is perfectly right, and then accept the 
 will of the majority. One result of the discus- 
 sion and, maybe, wrangling is that we all become 
 educated by that very process. The very best op- 
 portunity in the world for self-discipline is offered 
 by a spiritual democracy. 
 
 (c) There is the problem of spirituality and 
 culiure. That used to be a more severe difficulty 
 with us. Our pioneers usually sprang up from 
 among the people, often without much culture. 
 And, because the instruments of culture were 
 
 [ 113 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 usually in the hands of the worldly State Church, 
 they often had a dislike for it. There is a con- 
 stant tide of increase from the uncultivated, the 
 “common people,” and we have always had the 
 untrained among us. But we have been solving 
 that problem from the beginning in our country 
 and the pioneers are engaged in doing so every- 
 where. In early days in America the fathers felt 
 the need of a better-trained ministry, and most of 
 our colleges were founded with that as their aim. 
 Some of those schools thus founded are: Brown, 
 1764; Colby, 1815; Colgate, 1819; Shurtleff, 
 1827; Georgetown, 1829; Acadia, 1831; the 
 others in due time. Our theological seminaries 
 were founded, beginning with Colgate, 1820; 
 Newton, 1825; Rochester, 1850; Louisville, 
 1859; Crozer, 1867; MacMaster, Kansas City, © 
 Southwestern, Berkeley, Northern, Eastern fol- 
 lowing later; and several also among the Negro 
 Baptists. 
 
 We are hearing the call for better equipment 
 and answering it. As our fathers met the prob- 
 lems of their day it seems hardly possible that we 
 should be less noble than they in perfecting the 
 schools we now have and in establishing others 
 as they may be needed, for we have greater wealth 
 than they had, and we live in an atmosphere more 
 favorable to the establishment and support of 
 schools. No doubt many men of wealth and con- 
 secration will be putting larger and still larger 
 sums into the establishment and equipment of all 
 needed schools and benevolent institutions. 
 
 [114] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 We have already produced men of letters, and 
 women too, and real spirituality is not incompati- 
 ble with the very highest culture of the soul in 
 mental, social, and esthetic power, else it would 
 be a reflection on our Maker. We see that. We 
 are solving the problem. 
 
 (d) There is the problem of socializing the in- 
 dividual. In some nations the social entity has 
 been everything, the individual nothing. The 
 integral idea in any democracy is the value of the 
 individual. In an autocracy he may be ignored. 
 Social culture must never destroy the individual- 
 ity. Two things are strictly required—that the 
 individual be socialized, be made one of a number, 
 and that he be still more of an individual with 
 all his values increased. Individualty must come 
 to its best when socialized—that is the law of 
 God. While we recognize the right of each and 
 every member of the church to an equal part with 
 the others in all privileges and work, we must put 
 each one into that team-work which is his destiny. 
 
 (e) We face another problem, that of unifying 
 ourselves. here is a threefold cure for all the 
 ills we feel so keenly in our ranks today: To 
 preach Christ fully, the Christ of the New Testa- 
 ment, the Christ of history, the Christ of Chris- 
 tian experience; to set forth the Baptist distinc- 
 tive in its essence and clarity, stripping it of all 
 accretions, and leaving it in all its wonderful fas- 
 cination to appeal to the souls of men; to lead 
 our people to undertake in cooperation the largest, 
 most exacting tasks at home and abroad. 
 
 [115] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 3. Results of Seeking the Objective 
 
 Immeasurable results will follow our effort to 
 discharge our sacred responsibilities to God, to 
 our own constituency and to our fellow men 
 everywhere. It will give us a new missionary en- 
 thusiasm. Jf we are to bestow our distinctive 
 on all who have it not, we shall try to find those 
 who are without it. That will lead us to the 
 discovery that there are about one and three- 
 quarter billions of people in the world, and that 
 at least one billion, or more than half, of them 
 belong to other religions than the Christian. The 
 dazzling numbers and distressing needs stir the 
 missionary instincts within us. They need Christ, 
 every one of them needs him, and, in their rela- 
 tional life, they must have this great truth of. 
 ours. Let us once see that, and a new missionary 
 ardor which can never be cooled will glow and 
 grow within us. Deficits in our missionary trea- 
 suries will never again be known. 
 
 It will restore the old passion for saving the 
 lost, and it will stimulate our new evangelism. 
 The old motive for bringing people to know our 
 Saviour and Lord will have a new setting and 
 reenforcement. The first duty of each Christian 
 to his Lord is to “ go”’ and find those who have 
 him not, whether it is to go across the room or 
 across the street or across the State or across the 
 ocean. It will mean personal evangelism. 
 
 It will awaken a new sense of our stewardship, 
 stewardship of our time, our talent, our material 
 
 [ 116 ] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 treasures—the trusts committed to us to be im- 
 parted to others. 
 
 It will compel us to cultivate and coordinate all 
 the virtues, to appreciate and appropriate those 
 virtues which our friends and fellow Christians 
 of other denominations who have not our distinc- 
 tive whole, have cultivated. We see how they 
 have been able to make up for that lack in a 
 measure. One denomination has given aggressive 
 and emotional energy to evangelism and adminis- 
 tration and has done wonders even with its handi- 
 cap. We may imitate that energy and enthusiasm. 
 and, with our great distinctive, should achieve 
 much more. Another denomination has pursued 
 methods of education and discipline and reverent 
 public worship with rich results. With the ad- 
 vantage of this great distinctive of ours why 
 should we not equal or even surpass them? Still 
 others hold their people to stedfast efforts with 
 liberal use of ritual and education and esthetic 
 and social culture; and there is nothing in our 
 distinctive to prevent the largest possible use of 
 all means of culture and worship if we make the 
 proper discriminations. 
 
 To be sure different temperaments move in dif- 
 ferent directions, but all may move under the 
 domination of this principle so essential in the 
 total life of mankind. There is not a high form 
 of true culture, whether esthetic, intellectual, ar- 
 tistic, or social, or any possible degree of Chris- 
 tian activity which need be omitted or lessened 
 by us who cherish that principle. In the old days 
 
 (4173) 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 of controversy our fathers sometimes felt distaste 
 for their methods of culture and activity. But we 
 shall emulate them in their virtues and thus give 
 our distinctive a new opportunity to embody itself 
 in all the forms of perfection of which we dream. 
 It will stir the motive of Christian fellowship as 
 we strive to crown our fellow Christians of other 
 denominations with what has been so rich a pos- 
 session of our own. 
 
 This will be a unifying power within the indi- 
 vidual because it searches the soul, awakens re- 
 sponsibility, and binds him to Christ; a unifying 
 power within each church and the denomination 
 because it gives us fellowship in the unvarying 
 truth of life; a unifying power within the ranks 
 of Christendom, for it furnishes the motive and 
 means for organization that will have an un- 
 movable basis and will leave each free to inter- 
 pret the Bible as his experiences require. It will 
 relieve Christianity of those unbiblical usages 
 which still bear witness to the superstitions out of 
 which they arose. 
 
 Our days of highest prosperity were when we 
 bore witness to the distinctive without flinching, 
 even though it involved us in controversy. But 
 greater days are ahead of us. We are to learn 
 that we can do more with our voluntary coopera- 
 tion than can those who are under overhead con- 
 trol. We are yet to see greater gifts for missions 
 than we have ever had, greater educational in- 
 stitutions than we now have, greater hospitals 
 and homes for the needy and greater freedom 
 
 [118 ] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 than were ever known before. Our distinctive 
 has shown what it can do in times of trouble and 
 persecution. Let us give it a chance in the time 
 of peace and prosperity. 
 
 A new art is needed, and the time is ripe for it, 
 the art of the Advocate of our Distinctive. The 
 advocacy must be personal rather than profes- 
 sional, practised by the laymen as well as by the 
 ministers. The advocates of many cults are do- 
 ing this. They go into homes, raise questions, 
 and then try to settle them in their own way. 
 They are always ready to talk to neighbors and 
 friends. about their remarkable ideas, and thus 
 they win many converts. Our aim must be dif- 
 ferent—simply to put them in possession of the 
 most simple and common-sense and Biblical and 
 practical idea known, and to do it without a desire 
 for victory or for converts, but for the enrich- 
 ment of our friends with this great truth. 
 
 Our efforts to put the whole world in posses- 
 sion of our distinctive whole need not be, should 
 not be, controversial. Controversies usually arise 
 out of different interpretations of the Scriptures, 
 and there are no such differences in this case in 
 the matters concerned. The three lines of inquiry 
 have been conducted by experts of all denomina- 
 tions and of no denomination, and they have all 
 made their final reports—as to the meaning of 
 the words under discussion, as to the original 
 activities and circumstances to which the words 
 apply, and as to the practise in the early centuries. 
 In other words, the dictionary-makers, lexicog- 
 
 [119] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 raphers, have forever settled for us the meaning 
 of the three Greek words—baptizo, to immerse; 
 rhantizo, to sprinkle; echeo, to pour—and the im- 
 possibility of an interchange of meaning between 
 the three or any two of them; the interpreters of 
 the Scriptures, exegetes, have settled for all people 
 the use which the Scriptures make of those words 
 so that its purpose in using them and the context 
 in which they are used make the meaning of the 
 dictionary as clear as sunlight; the historians have 
 told us when and why changes were made. All 
 of these matters are settled. We need not argue. 
 We need only say: “ You have consulted your 
 dictionary and read your Bible and your his- 
 torian; now return to the abandoned truths, let 
 us close the breach made by departures from 
 those truths so that we may have the old fellow- 
 ships restored.” 
 
 We have been silent about it so long that many 
 of our own people are wondering what it is we 
 really hold which makes us different from others. 
 We have been tired of controversy and have 
 wanted to show the others that we can be “ good 
 fellows ’ and cooperate with them, That is right 
 so far, but we have withheld from our own people 
 what they have a right to know and sorely need 
 to know. 
 
 And people of other denominations are won- 
 dering what it is that makes us different from 
 them, and why it is that we never say anything 
 about it. Some of them imagine and even say - 
 that we do not think a man can be saved without 
 
 [ 120 ] 
 
The Baptist Objective 
 
 
 
 being baptized when, as a matter of fact, no one 
 teaching that idea about baptism is a Baptist at all. 
 
 When they hear our story, simply and frankly 
 and fraternally told, they are usually charmed 
 with it, and they always wonder why people who 
 hold such a fascinating and essential truth are not 
 telling everybody about it. 
 
 Surprising results will always follow the right 
 sort of advocacy of it. I have had some delight- 
 ful experiences in telling it both in public and in 
 private. When I am to speak on it in my own 
 pulpit I usually announce it a week or two in 
 advance and frankly tell the people what they 
 may expect. I also say that I am announcing it 
 in advance so that any one who is anxious to 
 hear such a discussion may be sure to come and 
 that any one who does not care to hear it may 
 have the opportunity of staying away. No one 
 has ever seemed to stay away purposely, and I 
 have never failed to hear surprise and delight ex- 
 pressed at the fascinating character of our views. 
 [I give one instance. 
 
 In a certain city where I was preaching a young 
 couple came, she a Baptist and he a member of 
 another church. She brought her letter, and he 
 became a regular attendant with her. They area 
 cultured and lovable couple. I called on them 
 one evening and, when something was said about 
 his attending, I remarked, “I wish you could 
 come all the way with us.” ‘I am thinking of 
 it,’ he replied. Then I began to tell him what 
 really made one a Baptist. At once he spoke up 
 
 [121 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 and said: ‘‘ Yes, I heard you on that subject. I 
 was there when you announced it in advance, and 
 I said to myself I must not miss it, for | wanted 
 to be informed. I heard it, and it answered to 
 something within my own soul.”’ The result was 
 that I baptized him in a little while and he is now 
 a prominent and useful member of that church. 
 
 We have the most popular idea on earth. The 
 world is ready for it now as never before. 
 Preachers and teachers and all the members may 
 win new victories for Christ and for humanity by 
 informing themselves carefully, living it sensibly, 
 and advocating it wisely and lovingly. 
 
 [ 122 ] 
 
Vil 
 INSTRUMENTALITIES AND AGENCIES 
 
 When you joined the church you found in- 
 strumentalities and agencies already devised for 
 accomplishing its mission to its members and to 
 the outside world. They were worked out in 
 experience and may not have been perfect. In 
 fact, there was at once opened up to you an op- 
 ‘portunity and an obligation to improve all the 
 methods in use by the church. One of the bene- 
 fits of our democracy is that each one may use 
 his own ideas and add to those that are already 
 at work. Methods are shaped by the combined 
 wisdom of the group and may be constantly re- 
 shaped to fit constantly growing enterprises. 
 
 1. Local Work 
 
 The local work of your church is fourfold: 
 
 (1) It 1s evangelistic. That is simply saying 
 that, when you become a Christian, you want to 
 help some one else find Christ. I take that as the 
 first work of the church, to be preceded, of 
 course, by teaching and all the other means of 
 getting the truth of Christ before the people and 
 into their minds. There are three ways of doing 
 this work: through the appeal of the preacher in 
 his preaching; through the application of the 
 
 [123] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 truth in the teaching service of the church, the 
 Sunday school; through the personal efforts of 
 the members, including, of course, the minister. 
 Your church is pledged to win to Christ every 
 one within the sphere of its influence. As long as 
 a single unconverted person is within its reach, 
 that sort of work is unfinished and is therefore 
 imperative. 
 
 (2) It ts a disciplinary work, that is, it is a 
 work of making disciples in the fullest sense. 
 The church disciplines by educating its members. 
 It has some sort of educational system, even 
 though it may be only a loosely organized Sun- 
 day school. Classes in the Bible at the Sunday 
 school; classes in missions, whether at Sunday 
 school or separate from it; and classes in methods 
 of study and teaching and work are simply im- 
 perative in these days of experts in all lines of 
 work and study. The church trains not only by 
 education in the Bible and missions and methods 
 of work, but by assigning work to the members 
 and aiding them in the actual doing of it. That 
 work may be individual or cooperative; it may 
 be wholly within the church, or largely out in the 
 community, or ina more distant part of the world 
 field. 
 
 It also disciplines by watch-care, one over the 
 other, the older helping the younger by example 
 and suggestion and companionship, the more 
 mature putting their strength at the service of 
 the weaker. It disciplines by its ideals. It dis- 
 ciplines by guidance, correction, appreciation. 
 
 [ 124] 
 
Instrumentalities and Agencies 
 
 
 
 (3) Lhe church coordinates its members in 
 the great enterprise of putting the whole world in 
 possession of its Saviour and King, whose right it 
 is to rule over the world and over every person 
 in it. That will include local work and com- 
 munity work of several kinds. 
 
 Every church must have its organized school 
 studying the Bible and missions and the history 
 of Christianity and all the methods of work that 
 have commended themselves to its intelligence. 
 If your church has not such a school, it may be 
 you are the one to take the initiative in it or to 
 suggest and help establish it. 
 
 (4) A fourth enterprise of your church is the 
 uplift of your whole community, not only 
 through the influence of its members on it, but 
 by means of special effort in Christianizing its 
 laws, caring for the needy, educating its citizens, 
 and driving out its evils. 
 
 2. The Wider Work 
 
 1. Your church bears tts part in the coopera- 
 tive work of all the churches of the whole denom- 
 ination. Itis one of a group of churches forming 
 a District Association, which meets annually. 
 That Association has no authority over the 
 churches. On the contrary, it is the creature of 
 the churches, and they have complete authority 
 over it. It surveys the field occupied by the 
 churches composing it, hears reports of what is 
 done by each church, takes an outlook upon the 
 whole State or Province in which it is located, 
 
 [125] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 and upon the nation and the world as well, out- 
 lines suggestive programs for work in the local 
 churches, and stimulates them with information 
 and hints as to methods of work and as to their 
 vital fellowship in that work. 
 
 For each State or Province there is an or- 
 ganization: which serves for its field a purpose 
 similar to that of the District Association, while, 
 for a whole nation, or a large part of it, there 1s 
 a still larger organization. The value of these 
 organizations is that they preserve the voluntary 
 principle and add to its force the stimulus of 
 combined wisdom and voluntary fellowship. Of 
 course human nature is so imperfect that a more 
 authoritative control over the churches by some 
 overhead body might get larger results at the out- 
 set, but not in the outcome. 
 
 Note that these larger bodies promote world-_ 
 wide missions, education in each State or Prov- 
 ince or nation or mission field, and benevolence of 
 various kinds, including social service in some 
 form. Get the denominational records and re- 
 ports of work done over the whole world. 
 
 (2) The wider work has reference to our co- 
 laborers of the other denominations who are do- 
 ing a work corresponding to our own. Our re- 
 lation to them must be that of sympathy and 
 good-will. It will at times be a relation of active 
 cooperation. Community work may often re- 
 quire not only the individual cooperation of 
 Christian people of all the denominations in the 
 community, but actual church cooperation, as in 
 
 [126 
 
Instrumentalities and Agencies 
 
 
 
 supporting institutions like the Y. M. C. A., the 
 Y. W. C. A., the Red Cross, homes for unfor- 
 tunates of different classes, temperance move- 
 ments, community-wide evangelism, etc. In 
 opening new missions we should consider the 
 work being done in a given place by those bodies, 
 and should be wise enough to spend our money 
 where those most needy will get the benefit of 
 it. All this can and must be done with a view 
 to fulfilling our mission to give the world the 
 whole truth as we see it. We need never be un- 
 true to our principles in such work. 
 
 [ 127 ] 
 

 
PART III 
 
 YOUR PART 
 

 
I 
 WHAT YOU ARE TO DO 
 
 You must have a part in this varied and am- 
 bitious work of your church, both its local and 
 general work. In joining you accepted its scheme 
 of work, with such improvements as you and 
 others may be able to make in it. Not only a 
 part, but your own personal, specific part must 
 you have in it. 
 
 1. Why? . 
 
 (1) You will suffer if you do not. You will 
 suffer in your own estimate of yourself. You are 
 adapted by the new Christian nature and 
 prompted by your own Christian impulses to 
 have a part in that work and, if you fail to do so 
 for any reason whatsoever, you will have an in- 
 curable discontent with yourself. You will often 
 say to yourself: “ I’m the one who made a cove- 
 nant with some good people and am not keeping 
 it. Worse still, my covenant expresses profound 
 and essential relations with those people, and I 
 am living in violation of them.” The conscious- 
 ness of not being true to your pledges will cause 
 you pain. | 
 
 You will be unhappy if you fail to do your 
 part. 
 
 [131] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 The one who drifts 
 
 And never lifts 
 
 A burden from the dust, 
 
 Can never know the heartfelt glow 
 Which yonder reaper must. 
 
 It will mean disease of the soul—low spirits, 
 sour temper, wounded pride, heartache, fatty de- 
 generation of the heart, torpid emotions, irregu- 
 lar action of the vital processes, wrong blood 
 pressure, bad blood, cold heart, religious dys- 
 pepsia, bad tongue (very bad!). You will be a 
 trouble-maker. You will be apt to become what 
 is called a grouch. 
 
 You will suffer in the estimation of others. In 
 selecting those on whom they can always depend, 
 they will pass you by as not dependable. They 
 may even apply to you the repulsive term 
 “slacker,” and do so in perfect justice. Your - 
 reputation among your brethren is an asset far 
 too valuable to give up. : 
 
 (2) The work will suffer. You will lower 
 the moral tone of the church. Your coldness 
 will lower the temperature 01 the whole body. 
 You will lessen its energy and efficiency, for, in 
 carrying you, it will carry a useless weight and 
 thereby use up power that is needed in doing 
 something useful and constructive. You will 
 lessen the spiritual value of the church as well 
 as its vitality. You will compel the church to 
 carry in its system so much undigested matter, 
 which is sure to produce in some degree a toxic 
 condition. Spiritual disease will afflict the body, 
 
 [ 132 ] 
 
What You Are to Do 
 
 and the germ center of that disease will be— 
 you. 
 
 (3) Some good people will suffer also, for 
 there are in the church generous souls who will 
 do more than their share in order to do your 
 neglected share. Some work will go forever 
 undone unless you do it, something that no one 
 will know about, no one can get into contact with, 
 no one can really do, but you. 
 
 (4) Others outside the church will suffer. 
 The volume of the church’s work will be lessened 
 and its quality injured. The community will get 
 less than it is entitled to. Some people will be 
 neglected. The evangelistic, the benevolent, and 
 the disciplinary work will suffer, and all who 
 would benefit by your efforts will lose through 
 your failure to function as a covenant-keeping 
 and duty-doing member. 
 
 2. How? 
 
 I said that you are to have a part, and that 
 must be your own personal part. 
 
 It means two things. One is that you must do 
 many things by yourself and of yourself, such as 
 giving your own share of the money to be ex- 
 pended and doing the tasks that you alone can do. 
 There are opportunities that you alone can see 
 and you alone can seize. There are tasks that you 
 alone can undertake and perform, words to speak, 
 deeds to do, a personal touch to give that no one 
 other than yourself can even think of, much 
 less do. . 
 
 [133 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 It also means that you are to do your part of 
 the common tasks in the team-work which is so 
 necessary. Perhaps you will furnish the idea, 
 or the plan, or the directive oversight, and there- 
 by make the work of others possible and effective, 
 or you may work at some humble part of the task 
 which your talents fit you for, while others work 
 in the limelight and in the positions of promi- 
 nence. 
 
 The team-work in which you are to engage is 
 team-work with the whole body, as when you put 
 your share of money into the whole sum, or teach 
 in the church school, or engage in some special 
 campaign. 
 
 It will also be team-work in smaller groups, 
 or small communities, or in a small body of 
 officers. 
 
 Or it may be team-work with some one person, © 
 as Peter and John, Paul and Barnabas, Paul and 
 Timothy, Luther and Melancthon, and hundreds 
 of teams of two have done. Two ones added 
 make two, but place the two ones side by side 
 and they made eleven. You and the other man 
 by your team-work multiply each other, you com- 
 plement, complete each other. 
 
 You are to have a part in every activity of the 
 church. You must be an evangelist, a private, 
 personal, persistent, loving evangelist. That is 
 the highest work of all. It involves so much on 
 your part—knowledge of the person whom you 
 wish to lead to Christ and an understanding of 
 his needs; knowledge of the truths he must have; 
 
 [ 134 ] 
 
What You Are to Do 
 
 
 
 knowledge of the way to state the truths and to 
 make the appeal. It involves prayer to God and 
 cooperation with the Spirit of God, for it is he 
 that worketh in you both to will and to do his 
 work, and it is he that convicts men of their need 
 of Christ. In winning a person to Christ you 
 bring more to him than you can in anything else 
 you ever can do for him. You bring Christ and 
 all the wonders of the reign of God in the soul. 
 The blessings you secure to that person never 
 cease to ennoble him. You will often need 
 the help of some other Christian in winning 
 others. 
 
 When you take part your growth is more com- 
 plete and more rapid and your joy is greater. It 
 is like the joy that Jesus felt, as it is said, ‘‘ Who 
 for the joy that was set before him, endured the 
 cross, despising the shame.” It was the joy he 
 felt amidst the agonies of Calvary as he thought 
 of the millions he would save from sin by suffer- 
 ing on the cross. You will help to put that sort 
 of spirit into the whole church. 
 
 You will have your part in the educational 
 work of the church. There is a place for you, 
 and it is your own personal, peculiar place—in 
 the Sunday school as a pupil or officer or teacher. 
 You will have your place in the missionary work 
 of the church, in the missionary studies, and in 
 the missionary giving. 
 
 We speak of the benevolent work of the 
 church, its contributions to the needy, its ministry 
 to the sick and the troubled. Your part in those 
 
 [135 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 forms of work is awaiting you. It will be your 
 own personal work, your part in the organized 
 work of the church. 
 
 It will require study and prayer, a ready mind, 
 and a loving heart. 
 
 3. Some Suggestions 
 
 (1) Grasp our great distinctive clearly so that 
 you will always know when it is disregarded or 
 imperiled. 
 
 (2) Be able to explain it to any one, giving a 
 reason for the conviction that is in you. 
 
 (3) Be sure to have our total objective before 
 you all the time. 
 
 (4) Hold to the distinctive and aim at the ob- 
 jective in a large and fraternal rather than in a 
 small and jealous spirit. 
 
 (5) Accept your responsibility for the preser- 
 vation of this distinctive and the attainment of 
 our objective. 
 
 (6) Understand the complete set of gospel 
 truths to which this belongs. 
 
 (7) Be ready to undertake the first task that is 
 offered to you. 
 
 (8) Be on the lookout for special work that 
 you alone can do. 
 
 (9) Familiarize yourself with the work that 
 others are doing, in order to find where you can 
 assist. 
 
 (10) Do not allow your devotion to the work 
 of the church to be affected by circumstances 
 without or by your own moods. 
 
 [ 136 ] 
 
What You Are to Do 
 
 (11) See how much you can do and not how 
 little you can get off with. 
 
 (12) Be sure, some time, to do more than you 
 are able to do. You will never do all that you 
 can do unless you sometimes do more than you 
 can do. The very effort to do the impossible, 
 if you have confidence in God, will bring to you 
 new strength, and that makes the impossible pos- 
 sible. God always gives strength when he gives 
 a task, and he is sure to give a task greater than 
 you are equal to till you put your hand to it and 
 find his power energizing you. 
 
 (13) Seek to have a good reputation with your 
 fellow Christians, not simply for the sake of 
 the reputation, but in order to have a character 
 worthy of the reputation and to have the oppor- 
 tunity which the reputation will bring you. 
 
 (14) Give the church a good reputation in the 
 community. 
 
 (15) Make your own church indispensable in 
 the great work of the denomination. 
 
 (16) Have some part, through your church, 
 in every form of work which the denomination 
 is undertaking in every one of its fields through- 
 out the world. 
 
 (17) Avail yourself of all the means of cul- 
 ture that the church has devised, and devise others 
 if you are able, for the church as well as for 
 yourself. 
 
 (18) Have an understanding with yourself 
 that you will not only have faith in your fellow 
 Christians, but enable them to have complete 
 
 [ 137 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 faith in you. Faith compels faithfulness. Fidel- 
 ity wins confidence. 
 
 (19) Send to your Baptist headquarters and 
 get suggestive forms of organization for your 
 work. They have outlines of methods for work 
 in all departments—Sunday school, men’s work, 
 women’s work, young people’s work, junior work. 
 Their little pamphlets embody the wisdom of the 
 experts. 
 
 [ 138 ] 
 
IT 
 
 THE POWERS WITH WHICH YOU 
 WORK 
 
 1. Speech 
 
 I begin with this because it is the most obvious 
 and representative of all your powers. It is a 
 distinctive of personality. If you were a cat or 
 a dog or an owl or a mule, you would not need 
 to “say something,” but, as a human being, the 
 first imperative is to speak when you are accosted 
 by any one or commanded by the voice of duty. 
 
 Your powers of speech serve the double pur- 
 pose of expressing what is in you and imparting 
 it to others. You may do that in other ways, but 
 this is the superlative way. For that reason we 
 are not surprised to find how wonderfully made 
 are the organs of speech. The power to convert 
 the vibrating air into words and give those words 
 such variations in pitch and power and content of 
 emotion as to express what your mind thinks, 
 your heart feels, your conscience approves, and 
 your will determines, is far more marvelous than 
 any of the startling inventions of these scientific 
 days. 
 
 But that is only half of the wonder. The 
 other half is that there are receiving-stations at- 
 tuned to your speech which can take in your 
 
 [ 139 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 words, vibrate to them, and reproduce them in 
 souls like your own. It is somewhat like the 
 telephone. You speak your words into the re- 
 ceiver and that starts the air to vibrating. Those 
 vibrations of air are converted into electrical 
 vibrations and, flashing along the line with light- 
 ning speed, are reconverted into air vibrations at 
 the other end, and enter the ear of the listener in 
 the original form into which you put what was 
 in your mind, imparting the words with their 
 pitch and power and feeling—a marvel indeed. 
 Remember that in speech you aim to impart as 
 well as express. 
 
 In taking your part you have the double plea- 
 sure of expressing and imparting, each a joy of a 
 high order, especially the latter. 
 
 In addition to the pleasure you give yourself 
 there is the discipline through which you take 
 yourself. It is a manifold discipline—discrim- 
 inating in character, discarding what should 
 never be expressed, much less imparted; select- 
 ing what is suitable to be expressed at a given > 
 time and to a given person or group of persons; 
 study of the needs of those to whom you would 
 impart a truth or emotion or purpose; controlling 
 yourself in the doing of it; effacing yourself in 
 the interest of others—a vital discipline in unself- 
 ishness and effectiveness. All of this you do in 
 the interest of unselfish service to your fellow 
 men. 
 
 I am not referring to public speaking especially, 
 but to the use of the powers of speech, whether in 
 
 [ 140 ] 
 
Powers With Which You Work 
 
 
 
 public or in private. Perhaps you may be called 
 on to be a preacher of the gospel, and in that case 
 you will have to use this mighty power both pub- 
 licly and privately. The early disciples ‘‘ went 
 everywhere, preaching the word,” and the word 
 for “ preaching’ is about the same as our word 
 “ talking,’ almost the same as “chatting.” You 
 are to achieve your part in that wonderful enter- 
 prise which we have been considering, by what 
 you say, though not in that way alone. 
 
 An instrument capable of setting forth what 
 is in you in such way that others can appropriate 
 it and convert it into similar thought and emotion 
 and purpose, is a power that can wreck as well 
 as upbuild. It can awaken others to a sense of 
 their needs and their possibilities, can energize 
 and encourage and fraternize and humanize and 
 divinize them; yet, on the other hand, it can ex- 
 press your very worst till it will turn on you to 
 derange and even demonize you, while it will chill 
 and cut and stab and poison and wreck those to 
 whom you impart it. 
 
 Therefore, train the powers with which you 
 express yourself in order to make the best suc- 
 cess of it in your power; have the right thing to 
 impart to those who need; know as perfectly as 
 possible what their needs are, both specific and 
 general. Remember what James tells us, in chap- 
 ter three of his epistle, about the evils as well as 
 the value of the tongue as the instrument for ex- 
 pression and impartation. Also recall the words 
 of Longfellow in his little poem about ‘“ The 
 
 [ 141 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 Arrow and the Song.” He shot an arrow into 
 the air and years afterward found it unbroken 
 in the heart of an oak, while the song, from 
 beginning to end, he found again in the heart of 
 a friend. Remember.that, when you speak, what 
 God approves is his own word, and that word 
 cannot return to him void. (Isa. 55: 11.) There 
 is scarcely a blessing that cannot be floated to 
 another on the current of consecrated conversa- 
 tion, and when you see what your appeal and 
 instruction and warning can do in restraining 
 and educating and comforting and ennobling peo- 
 ple, you will surely want to train every power 
 of expression to its highest and use it to the ut- 
 most. But back of the organs of speech is some- 
 thing else. It is the power of 
 
 2. Thought 
 
 I said the organs of speech express what you | 
 think about. So you serve with thought-power. 
 That is a source on which the speech draws. A 
 tongue cannot run without something behind it. 
 Unless you use your thought-power well, your 
 tongue will lack certain important things to say 
 that it ought to have at command. Think 
 through your tasks, your great body of truths, 
 think of your associates, your fellow men for 
 whom you are to work. Train your judgments 
 to work through your tongue. 
 
 Here are three duties: to use your powers of 
 thought; to train them, both by use and by ser- 
 vice; to understand all the tasks assigned to you. 
 
 [ 142 | 
 
Powers With Which You Work 
 
 Know all the mission fields and as many names 
 of the missionaries as you can, know the theory 
 and history of modern missions. Know the prin- 
 ciples of religious education, which are employed, 
 or ought to be employed, in the Sunday school 
 and in all the departments of church education. 
 Know the body of truths that are vital and foun- 
 dational in the teachings of Christianity. The 
 intellect cannot be neglected by the Christian 
 worker. In truth, as a teacher, you have the best 
 opportunity to become really cultured that is 
 possessed by anybody, other things being equal, 
 when you consider your associates, your text- 
 books, and the great truths involved. 
 
 3. Heart-power 
 
 John the Baptist said he was only a voice; but 
 voice is the instrument of mind and heart and 
 of every other power of the man. You put heart 
 into the work, for the tongue expresses what is in 
 the heart, and it must be worthy to be expressed. 
 
 First of all, you must control the production 
 of feeling, both the character and volume of it, 
 a very simple thing. You cannot command the 
 proper feelings to come up from the depths of the 
 soul in their suitable amounts; but you can feed 
 the soul properly, and the right feelings will come 
 by growth. You maintain a censorship over the 
 heart. Read what Jesus says in Matthew 15 : 
 18-20 about the output of the evil heart. 
 
 Secondly, you must direct the current of the 
 heart’s output upon the work you are to do, 
 
 | 143 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 direct it through the proper channel of expres- 
 sion. ‘That will energize your ideas and words 
 and make your words welcome and effective. 
 
 4. Conscience 
 
 Conscience is the power within you that ap- 
 proves or disapproves of what you do. It must 
 be ever active, but it must be instructed by the 
 word of God and sensitized by the Spirit of God 
 who dwells within you. There is nothing at all 
 that you can ever do which the conscience ‘will not 
 approve or disapprove. As a driving-power, it 
 makes any duty possible and agreeable. 
 
 5. Will-power 
 
 The thing that distinguishes man from the 
 brute is personality, and the most distinctive thing 
 about personality is the will. ‘There is nothing 
 that is impossible with God, and there is scarcely 
 anything that God will not do for and through 
 the one who uses his will in the service of God. 
 The conversion of a soul is really the surrender 
 of the will to do God’s will and, instead of weak- 
 ening it, that surrender brings into the soul the 
 power of God’s will. The art of willing is a cen- 
 tral art and a well-instructed and persistent will 
 is a great treasure in the work you are called to 
 do. It will take you through all opposing ob- 
 stacles and keep you ever at it. Every form of 
 distraction will be in your way, and a holy pur- 
 pose is the only thing that will keep you from 
 falling or turning aside. 
 
 [144] 
 
Powers With Which You Work 
 
 6. Social Power 
 
 Consecrate to the cause of your church your 
 talent for friendship and social enjoyment and 
 your talent for gratifying the social needs of 
 others. If your social standing is command- 
 ing, that is a gift of God to be used for your 
 people. It belongs to humanity. The church 
 needs it. 
 
 7. Executive Power 
 
 Whatever executive power you have is sorely 
 needed, nothing else is more needed. It is re- 
 quired in teaching your class and in handling 
 them for the high ends you aim at, as a sort of 
 army, or regiment in the church army. You will 
 need it in leading the young people, or the mis- 
 sion circle, or the committee of which you are 
 chairman. If you are not gifted with executive 
 ability, then appreciate it in others, and be a 
 good follower of the leader in whose group you 
 belong. 
 
 8. Looks 
 
 The countenance, the bearing, as well as the 
 tones of voice, are a means of working. They 
 add to or subtract from what you do. Looks 
 and facial expression alone, without words or 
 deeds, have a vital power. You may do a thing 
 with a look that will render the deed impotent; 
 you may say a thing in a tone of voice that will 
 deny what you say. 
 
 | 145 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 9. Hands 
 
 Yours must be a head, hand, and heart religion. 
 Jesus said, “ Why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do 
 not the things that I say?”’ Read the second 
 chapter of James and hear what he says about 
 professing great things while doing nothing. 
 Then turn to 1 John 3 : 7 and read what is said 
 about it. There is enough to keep many hands 
 busy, and you must have a part in all the well- 
 doing that is going on in the church, in the com- 
 munity, in the world. Hand religion really in- 
 cludes foot religion, includes all active service. 
 
 10. Money 
 
 Your money is an instrument of service, and a 
 great big instrument it is. John Wesley had the 
 right of it when he said that every man ought 
 to make as much as possible, save as much as | 
 possible, give as much as possible. Here are 
 some facts about your money that will help you 
 to know its meaning in your Christian life: 
 
 (1) It all belongs to God, because you belong 
 to him by creation and by your choice of Christ 
 as Saviour whereby you are his by recreation in 
 Christ; because the raw material of wealth was 
 put into the ground for you; because you have 
 been especially blessed by him in your use of those 
 materials; because that which makes it all valu- 
 able is due to the civilization which his providence 
 has developed; because all your powers with 
 which you have gained it are the gift of God and, 
 
 [ 146 ] 
 
Powers With Which You Work 
 
 as he owns you and the powers with which you 
 work, and the material on which you work, you 
 can never have anything at all which you can 
 own absolutely. 
 
 (2) It can all be used for the good of man, 
 even the part you hold back for your own sup- 
 port and the part you use in continuing your busi- 
 ness. You can make money in such a way as to 
 be doing good with every cent of it, whether you 
 are an employer or an employee. 
 
 (3) You can turn that money into character, 
 your own character, in the way you make it and 
 in the way you use it after it is made; into the 
 characters of those on whom you use it, both 
 while making it and afterward. 
 
 (4) It is the ripened fruit of your own powers 
 at work and can be made to represent you in the 
 church and in the mission field. 
 
 (5) God wants you to recognize his owner- 
 ship over it and over you by having a definite 
 part of it put into his definite work. ‘The part 
 that seems right is one-tenth. Write to “ Lay- 
 man ” of Chicago for literature giving a complete 
 treatment of the tithing principle. 
 
 This is the point: your money is an instrument 
 of service, a powerful, convincing, effective in- 
 strument. Learn its nature, its value, and the 
 art of using it. 
 
 11. Relationships 
 
 Your relationships in the home, in the church, 
 and in the community are all endowments of 
 
 [ 147 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 power. You begin your work with those with 
 whom you are connected in these ways. The 
 ties that bind are the trails along which influence 
 goes and efforts are made for the good of those 
 with whom you are connected in those ways. 
 
 12. Personality 
 
 That is your own self, that entity in which 
 are centered all those powers of which I have 
 been speaking. You yourself are the important 
 factor in your work. Emerson said, ‘‘ What you 
 are sounds so loud I cannot hear what you say.” 
 You are behind the words you say, the deeds you 
 do, and you impart the subtle power of yourself 
 to them. The nurture and the use of that self 
 which uses all those powers is the paramount 
 concern. Be what you should be, and you will 
 almost surely say what you should say and do 
 what you should do. The how of it is expressed | 
 in the words of the evangelistic song which says, 
 “Tl be what you want me to be, dear Lord.” 
 Self-making and self-mastering are not easy, but 
 there is a very definite way of doing it. 
 
 We always take account of personal influence. 
 You have it. Make it as big a thing as possible. 
 Look again through all those several powers of 
 which I have spoken, and be sure of three things: 
 That you use each power thoroughly and pur- 
 posely; that you use them in true harmony and 
 balance, each supporting the other; that all the 
 time you develop them for still greater use- 
 fulness. 
 
 [ 148 ] 
 
Powers With Which You Work 
 
 All of these powers head up in your personal- 
 ity, and they constitute your opportunity, or fit 
 you to meet your opportunities. 
 
 Remember also these two facts: 
 
 First, that you can never be happy unless you 
 follow this course. All who work with all their 
 powers are happy. Not one is grouchy and dis- 
 agreeable. ‘here are workers who are grouchy, 
 and some of them are quite useful; but they do 
 not work with all their powers, and they are not 
 nearly so useful as they could be. If you are not 
 useful in the whole range of your talents and 
 powers you will be uncomfortable within yourself 
 and in your association with others. 
 Secondly, that your work will not be in vain, 
 
 cannot be in vain. Listen to Paul: ‘‘ Wherefore, 
 my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmovable, 
 always abounding in the work of the Lord, foras- 
 much as ye know that your labor is not in vain 
 Wetoe Word = (Gt Cor, 315 2458): As. he jalso 
 wrote to a young minister, so he says to you, 
 “Take heed unto thyself’ (1 Tim. 4 : 16). 
 
 [ 149 ] © 
 
Tit 
 
 THE POWER FROM ABOVE 
 
 You accomplish your work in the making of 
 character, your own and that of others, by the 
 use of the powers with which God has endowed 
 you by nature and by grace, but those powers are 
 unequal to the stupendous achievement. You 
 have to secure an added power that will vitalize 
 and energize and fertilize them. There is an 
 element in the perfected human character which 
 no unaided human powers are competent to place 
 there or to develop it after it has been placed 
 there. 
 
 1. That Power Has Its Source in God the Father 
 
 That is true because all power came originally 
 from him. We may distinguish four different 
 kinds of power. One is physical. We appreciate 
 that; we need it; it is the instrument of great 
 deeds. Another is psychical, something that re- 
 sides in the spirit and shows itself in thought and 
 emotion and all. the other ways in which your 
 spirit exhibits itself. Those powers are necessary 
 in God’s service. A third power is that of the 
 personality, and we know how important that is. 
 A fourth power comes directly from God into 
 the heart which reverences and trusts and obeys 
 
 [ 150 ] 
 
The Power from Above 
 
 him. That is the power I am talking about just 
 now. 
 
 You must have that in a personal way. Paul 
 tells the Philippians, ‘‘ work out your own salva- 
 tion,’ because it has already been worked, and it 
 is God “ who worketh in you both to will and to 
 work, for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2 : 12, 13). 
 He did this for his pleasure, and they were to do 
 it for the same reason. All your worth comes 
 from that source, and all your work is made pos- 
 sible by power from him. Whatever you are try- 
 ing to do will fail at some vital point, even 
 though you make use of all your noblest powers, 
 unless you get something from God which is 
 missing in your natural make-up and is required 
 in the product you are trying to turn out. “ My 
 God shall supply every need of yours” (Phil. 
 A: 19). “We are God's fellow workers’’ 
 
 Gu ore2210); 
 
 2. It is Made Possible to Us Through Jesus Our 
 Saviour 
 
 It is brought to us by him. Here are several 
 things he does: First, he reveals God to you and 
 to those whom you are helping to find him and 
 work for him. To reveal means to uncover. 
 You see God in him. Secondly, he brings you 
 and God together in peace by making an atone- 
 ment for your sins and making you love God. 
 Thirdly, he makes you a coworker with God. 
 Do you try to bring some one to God? He says, 
 “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me” 
 
 [151] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 (John 14: 6). Do you wish to know the Father © 
 and to teach men what he is? ‘‘ No man know- 
 eth the Father, save the Son and he to whomso- 
 ever the Son willeth to reveal him.” 
 
 In all this work of making yourself a good 
 Christian and helping others to do the same, you 
 are getting power from the Father through the 
 Son. That is what he did in himself, what he 
 did and is doing in you, what he tells you to do, 
 shows you how to do, secures for you the power 
 to do; as Paul said, “I can do all things through 
 Christ who strengtheneth me.” He gives you the 
 motive: ‘‘ The love of Christ constraineth us.” 
 You have a vital connection with God by Christ’s 
 life, as John said, “‘ In him was life, and the life 
 was the light of men”’ (John 1: 4). Paul says, 
 “Tt is no longer I, but Christ that liveth in me, 
 and that life which I now live in the flesh, I live 
 by faith which is in the Son of God, who loved 
 me and gave himself up for me” (Gal. 2 : 20). 
 Know Christ, and you will know God. Keep in 
 touch with him, and the sacred current will flow 
 into your life. 
 
 3. Christ is Mediated to You by the Holy Spirit 
 
 In the same way you will bring others to 
 Christ and strengthen them in Christ. 
 
 When Jesus was leaving he said, “ Ye shall 
 receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come 
 upon you.” 
 
 (1) It is that Spirit who will awaken those 
 whom you desire to bring to Christ, to a sense of 
 
 [ 152] 
 
The Power from Above 
 
 their need. Jesus told in advance that when the 
 Spirit came, he would convict the world of its 
 needs. (John 16 : 8-11.) 
 
 (2) It is the Spirit who will teach you the 
 meaning of truth and its use. (John 16 : 12-15.) 
 
 (3) He helps our infirmities in several ways, 
 as Paul tells the Romans (Rom. 8 : 26) ; he leads 
 us (Rom. 8 : 14), becomes the consciousness of 
 our childship to the Father (Rom. 8: 15-17), 
 guides and empowers us to pray (Rom. 8 : 26, 
 27), enables us to know that all things work to- 
 gether for our good. (Rom, 8 : 28.) 
 
 (4) He is the author of the whole Christian 
 character, its graces being his fruits. (Gal. 5 : 
 22-24.) 
 
 The Spirit does his work with you and through 
 you, but works from within you. Jesus said he 
 would send the Spirit, and then called him by 
 the name Paraklete in Greek, which means “ one 
 called to the side of another to help.” The Spirit 
 was called to our side by our needs, called to take 
 the place of the departing Christ, but he does 
 not stay at our side: he takes his place within, 
 and from that point of vantage does the many 
 things | have spoken of and many others. “ He 
 shall be in you,” said Jesus. ‘ Know ye not that 
 ye are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that 
 the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” asks Paul in 
 First Corinthians 3 : 16. 
 
 The Spirit directed Philip to the Ethiopian 
 and caught him away after that work was done. 
 (Acts 8 : 29-40.) So he will help you in your 
 
 [ 153 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 work. You need his power and wisdom and 
 love. Seek him. Depend on him. Yield to him. 
 He is always within you, even when you are 
 dull and indifferent and self-willed ; always there, 
 but often grieved (Eph. 4 : 30), his power often 
 quenched (1 Thess. 5 : 19), but always at work 
 in you, and always seeking to work through you. 
 
 [ 154 ] 
 
IV 
 
 HOW TO GET THAT POWER 
 
 1. Listening to God 
 
 There are three ways of doing that: in re- 
 ceiving what Jesus says to you; in responding 
 to the Spirit’s promptings within you; in getting 
 the teachings of the Bible. I am speaking espe- 
 cially of the latter, though that includes what 
 Jesus says to you as well as what it says about 
 him and about God and about you. 
 
 The Bible is the story of the revelation of God 
 in Christ, beginning with the creation of the race, 
 its sin, and the promise of a Redeemer, tracing 
 the history of the arrangements God made in get- 
 ting the world ready for Christ, then giving an 
 authentic and authoritative account of his life 
 and his teachings and his plans. 
 
 Your success in being a Christian in yourself 
 and a good “ Christian among Christians ’”’ will 
 be in exact proportion to your success in learning 
 the Bible and making use of it. No other book 
 can take its place, for it is the only book that has 
 what you are compelled to have in your blessed 
 business. Here are some of the considera- 
 tions: 
 
 (1) It is the only book that tells the story of 
 Jesus, your only Saviour and Teacher and King. 
 
 [155 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 (2) It tells that story accurately, adequately, 
 authoritatively, for it tells it in human language, 
 out of human experience, and makes an ex- 
 hibit of all divine resources to meet all human 
 needs. | 
 
 (3) It is the source-book of all the other books 
 that are worth while, the source of their ideas, or 
 characters, or style, or morals. | 
 
 (4) It is the source-book of all the great char- 
 acters since that time. 
 
 (5) It is the source-book of the great laws 
 that are operative in the world, for the laws of 
 America and Canada are based on the English 
 Common Law, the English law on the Code of 
 Justinian, and Justinian on Moses, while the 
 teachings and spirit of Jesus have softened it all 
 for us. 
 
 (6) It is the source-book of our civilization, 
 the only civilization that has not been self-de- 
 structive, a civilization that can endure only by 
 being controlled by this book. 
 
 (7) It is essential to a healthy, happy, and 
 victorious life. It has been compared to light, 
 for it leads you to the fountain of light, which is 
 Jesus. It has been compared to food, “ sweeter 
 also than honey and the honey-comb.” It has 
 been compared to the sword, “the sword of the 
 spirit” CE phi G37; Hebias iro eres 
 
 (8) It is the only book in which you can find 
 original information on certain vital matters. 
 One of those matters is the origin of the world 
 and of the race. Here is the account of it which 
 
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How to Get That Power 
 
 science is seeking. Another matter is that of 
 the origin of sin. Still another is the fact of 
 immortality. There are a good many reasons 
 why we believe we shall live on after the experi- 
 ence of death, but the Bible is at hand with defi- 
 nite and satisfying information. There is the 
 matter of the resurrection. Nature has hints, but 
 no proof of it. Some lofty souls have dreamed 
 of such a destiny for soul and body, but the Bible 
 tells about it and tells it in a way to satisfy every 
 normal question of the human mind. 
 
 Yes, your success in being a good Christian will 
 be in the degree in which you make a conquest 
 of the Bible as “the man of your counsel,” the 
 guide of your life. And it will enable you to do 
 that for the simple reason that it will connect 
 you up with the source of the power which you 
 must have, the power that originates in God the 
 Father, flows out to us through Jesus, and is 
 vitalized in the soul by the Holy Spirit, the One 
 who quickened us when we were “ dead in tres- 
 passes and in sin”’ (Eph. 2: 1). 
 
 Here are four things it will give you: (a) 
 Knowledge, which is the more immediate and ob- 
 jective result of reading and studying it. (b) In- 
 sight, for it is “living, and active, and sharper 
 than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to 
 the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints 
 and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts 
 and intents of the heart. And there is no creature 
 that is not manifest in his sight; but all things 
 are naked and laid open before the eyes of him 
 
 [ 157 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 
 
 with whom we have to do” (Heb. 4: 12, 13). 
 (c) Devotion. That means inspiration and energy 
 and enthusiasm and never-wearying fidelity. (d) 
 Skill, that is, tact. J actus is the Latin word for 
 touch. You havea sense of physical touch which 
 does two things for you. It discloses what a 
 given substance is—even though your eyes be 
 shut—and it suggests how you are to deal with 
 it. You touch a rose or a piece of iron with 
 closed eyes, and that sense of touch will do those 
 two things for you. You will never try to handle 
 the iron as if it were a rose. So your spirit 
 touches people, and that sense of touch serves 
 you in those two ways. You handle each person 
 in a different way, and Jesus gives you that touch 
 through the blessed book. That skill implies love 
 and sympathy and patience—the Bible disciplines 
 you in that manifold grace. You learn to know 
 what you need and what others need; you learn. 
 how to apply the teachings of the Bible to that 
 need. The one who learns that art becomes the 
 most useful person in the community. You will 
 never know what your work is or how to do it or 
 have the power or even the inclination to do it 
 unless you know the word. 
 
 There are six encouragements right here. One 
 is that the Bible is the most knowable book there 
 is. ‘The most learned person in all the world 
 will find something new in the Bible every time 
 he goes over the pages he has been reading since 
 childhood, and the most ignorant person in the 
 whole community will find something he can take 
 
 [158 ] 
 
How to Get That Power 
 
 hold of and live by. Another is that one bit of 
 knowledge always leads to more. And another is 
 that it grows more and more fascinating as you 
 learn it; its yoke is easy; its burden, light. 
 Again, it has something for you, whatever the 
 crying needs of your own life or the needs of 
 those you serve as a Christian. Fifthly, it dis- 
 closes its truths in the degree in which you yield 
 yourself to its sway. Jesus said that when he told 
 the people, “ If any man willeth to do his will [of 
 my Father who is in heaven], he shall know of 
 the teaching’ (John 7: 17). You learn by do- 
 ing. That’s true in all learning, and especially 
 true here. Sixthly, if you will apply the word 
 faithfully to yourself, you will be able to apply it 
 helpfully to others. It is trustworthy. Commit 
 yourself. to it. 
 
 The question of how to possess yourself of the 
 Bible and its wonderful teachings is a practical 
 one. You need, first, equipment. That means 
 a well-printed copy, preferably in the American 
 Revised edition, with maps, a Bible dictionary, 
 and index, all in the same cover, or in separate 
 volumes. One book may contain most of this. 
 Next, you need a method of using it. That 
 method will contain a time element, so that you 
 will be regular in your study. It will involve an 
 objective, meeting special needs in yourself and 
 in others. Method is essential. You will have 
 to create the method best adapted to your own 
 case, using those two elements of time and an 
 objective. 
 
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You and Your Church 
 
 2. Talking to God 
 
 By that I mean prayer. Reading the Scrip- 
 tures—listening to God—and prayer—talking to 
 God—will put you in such contact with the 
 source of power that you will never lack any- 
 thing. 
 
 You have to pray anyhow, because you are a 
 child of God and you cannot help talking to your 
 Father. Prayer is the very breath of the new 
 life in Christ. You would be utterly abnormal 
 if you did not want to speak to your Father. 
 No normal child wants to keep always utterly 
 dumb before its father. 
 
 God wants you to talk to him, else he would 
 be an unnatural Father. He enjoys having you 
 talk to him. Of course he does. He wants to 
 do many things for you which he would be utterly 
 unable to do if you did not pray. You also, as a. 
 Christian, desire to be what it is impossible for 
 you to become without prayer, and you want to 
 do many things which you cannot do unless you 
 pray. 
 
 So you see that your vigor, your enjoyment, 
 your growth, your success in work all require that 
 you pray. 
 
 (1) What is Prayer? 
 
 When I say prayer I mean one or all of four 
 things. 
 
 a. Prayer means association with God, fellow- 
 ship with him, being conscious of his controlling, 
 if not always comfortable, presence. We may 
 
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How to Get That Power 
 
 say simply communion with God, whatever you 
 may or may not ask of him or say to him. You 
 associate with him because of fellowship with 
 him; that fellowship with him is due to the rela- 
 tionships that exist between you two. He made 
 man in his image, and that broken image is re- 
 stored by Christ. You are reborn into his family. 
 You are akin to him. There is something like 
 him in you. The restoration of that old likeness 
 was begun when you were reborn into the image 
 of his sinless and eternal Son, Jesus, your Sa- 
 viour and Elder Brother, the typical member of 
 the family. It is being perfected as you grow like 
 Christ. That kinship draws you to God and you 
 enjoy being with him. He wants that form of 
 prayer which we call “conscious communion ” 
 with him, to be habitual. Perhaps that is what 
 Paul meant when he said, “ Pray without ceas- 
 ing’ (1 Thess. 5 : 17)—be ever in an attitude 
 of such fellowship with the Father that it would 
 be entirely easy to utter your supplication any 
 minute—be always in the spirit of prayer. God 
 wants you to be aware of him every minute, 
 conscious of his presence, for he is actually 
 always with you. Then why not be aware of 
 that presence? 
 
 b. Prayer means the utterance of your praise 
 and thanks for what he has done for you and 
 for what he is, and always has been, to you. He 
 has already done so much more than you could 
 ever ask him for, that the volume of your praise 
 should be larger than the volume of your peti- 
 
 [161 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 tions. It is hard for you to have the fellow- 
 ship with him without spending most of your 
 thought on being grateful. You will be thank- 
 ing him most of the time. The word “thank” 
 and the word “think”’ are the same except for 
 one letter. They are actually from the same root 
 word, and the meaning is that the normal process 
 of thinking is one of thanking God for what he 
 has done and for what he is. The words “ praise” 
 and appraise vand prize ands) price mage 
 ‘“precious’’ have a common origin. You ap- 
 praise God’s value in praising him, tell how pre- 
 cious he is, show how you prize him, set a super- 
 lative price on him. The word “ worship” is a 
 contraction of the word “ worthship.”” In your 
 worship you declare God’s worth in so far as a 
 human being can declare the infinite. 
 
 c. Prayer 1s petition for what you need, or 
 think you need: for wisdom (James I : 5-8); 
 for forgiveness'(1 John’ 1°: 9; Isa. 55 2-7) ston 
 strength for your work and every needed blessing 
 (Ps. 37: 4). You will need to ask many things 
 for yourself. (1 John 5 : 14,15.) The teachings 
 of the Scriptures on the subject are full and 
 stimulating. Search out its teachings for your- 
 self. 
 
 d. Prayer will often be intercession. That 
 word “ intercession’? means walking between. 
 You are farther along, at least in some things, 
 than a certain other person, walking on ahead of 
 him. Then walk in between that person and 
 God and get something from God for him that he 
 
 [ 162] 
 
How to Get That Power 
 
 may not know how to get for himself or may 
 need, over and above what he himself is able to 
 get. He will need, at the least, the love which 
 you put into your petition for him. ‘There is a 
 social value in praying for others. We are tied 
 up in the bundle of life with others, and we must 
 make their interest our own when we pray. 
 
 You will be able to get strength and wisdom 
 for some of your tasks only through prayer, and 
 you will be able to secure blessings for others 
 through prayer, blessings that they will go with- 
 out all their lives unless you pray for them. 
 
 Read the farewell interview of Samuel with 
 the people as he turned them over to the king 
 whom they were determined to have. When, in 
 - emotional contrition, they asked him to pray for 
 them, his response was one of the noblest words 
 ever uttered: “ Far be it from me that I should 
 sin against Jehovah in ceasing to pray for you”’ 
 (1 Sam. 12: 23). Especially do I recommend 
 the team-work praying which Jesus invites us to 
 do in Matthew 18: 19: “If two of you shall 
 agree on earth as touching anything that they 
 shall ask, it shall be done for them by my Father 
 who is in heaven.”’ And I ask if you do not 
 think you sin against any one who needs your 
 prayers, when you fail, or cease, to pray for that 
 one. If you can secure vitally needed blessings 
 through prayer, it is your sin not to pray; if 
 you can meet some urgent need of others by 
 praying for them, surely you will not do so 
 wrong a thing as not to pray. 
 
 [ 163 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 (2) Some Suggestions About How to Pray. 
 
 a. You are to pray with every power of body 
 and soul, with every power you have. 
 
 b. Your praying should take account of every 
 interest of yours, for God is interested in every- 
 thing that is of interest or importance to you. 
 Cultivate the habit of talking to God about every- 
 thing and leaving with him what sort of an- 
 swer to give, yes or no, and, if yes, what it 
 shall be, when he will give it, and how he will 
 do it. 
 
 c. Let your praying take account of everything 
 of importance to others. You should spend more 
 time in talking to God about others than about 
 your own personal interests, for there are so 
 many more of them. 
 
 d. Let your praying take account of all of God, 
 not of his love alone, but of his power; not of his 
 power alone, but of his perfect knowledge, for. 
 he knows all things; not of his knowledge alone, 
 but of his wisdom, for he knows exactly what is 
 best; not of his wisdom alone, but of his omni- 
 presence as well, for he can deliver the answer to 
 your prayers over in China as well as in your 
 home; not of his omnipotence alone, but of his 
 tender interest in you. 
 
 e. Let your praying take account of all God's 
 interests. He is interested in many people and in 
 many different kinds of enterprises. He stored 
 the physical world with many treasures, and he 
 is interested in seeing us discover and use them. 
 He is at work among the stars, and you can study 
 
 [ 164 ] 
 
How to Get That Power 
 
 them in that light, rejoicing in the fact that they 
 belong to your Father and that he 1s engaged in 
 stupendous enterprises. His is the vast enterprise 
 of missions over the world. 
 
 f. Let the praying be constant, “ without ceas- 
 ing.’ That means two things, that you are al- 
 ways in the attitude of prayer and that, when you 
 have undertaken a prayer enterprise, you keep it 
 up till the answer comes, even if it takes a 
 half century. Pray it through, talk it out with 
 God. 
 
 (3) As to the Method, or Habit, of Prayer. 
 
 a. Make the resolution, and keep it active in 
 the mind, that you will get all out of praying 
 that can be gotten out of it, that you will secure 
 whatever God can do for you and for your work 
 in behalf of others. 
 
 b. Make a special study of all the teachings 
 of the Bible about praying. You might spend 
 a season on that subject. Then about once a 
 year study the subject afresh. 
 
 c. Read the stories of the prayer-life of emi- 
 nent servants of God and, in the reading of biog- 
 raphy, note the illustrations of the power of 
 prayer in men’s lives. Take the cases of Moody, 
 Gen. Chinese Gordon, and General Havelock as 
 instances. 
 
 d. Have regular times for prayer in which you 
 can be absolutely alone. Jesus was wise in say- 
 ing, “ Shut the door” when you enter your closet 
 for your private, personal prayer. The reason 
 is that, if you are aware of the fact that your 
 
 [ 165 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 door is unlocked, you will have the consciousness 
 that you might be interrupted at any minute and, 
 therefore, your mind will be divided, you cannot 
 concentrate your thoughts in prayer. It is strictly 
 necessary to be alone with God at times, even 
 at regular times. Moses was alone with God 
 when the call and the glory came to him at the 
 burning bush. Jacob was alone with God when 
 he had that vision which ultimately changed his 
 life. Isaiah and God were shut up together when 
 the prophet saw himself and humanity and God 
 in a new light. Paul was caught up into the 
 third heaven, and he and God seemed to be the 
 only ones in existence. John on the Island of 
 Patmos saw that panorama of apocalyptic glory 
 when no one was near but God. You must be 
 alone with God, in the consciousness that you are 
 face to face with him. 
 
 e. Have special seasons of prayer. Appoint a 
 day of worship for yourself. Take a holiday for 
 prayer and take your prayer-list with you. Re- 
 member the whole church, the officers, the vari- 
 ous groups, the missionaries, the general workers 
 of the denomination and of all Christian bodies, 
 the rulers of the land, the interests of the com- 
 munity. (Matt. 5 : 44; Eph. 6 : 18-20; 1 Tim. 
 2: 1-3.) Keep a list of the unconverted of the 
 congregation and those belonging to the families 
 of the church. Have the names and needs of 
 the afflicted ever in your mind. Let your praying 
 be concrete, specific, personal. Take heed to your 
 prayer-life. Talk much with God. 
 
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How to Get That Power 
 
 3. Working with God 
 
 This is a third way of securing the power you 
 must get from God—working with him. Of 
 course, if you do anything at all that is right, you 
 work with God, because you work with the mate- 
 rial which he has created and placed in the soil, 
 or under the soil, or in the air, or in the sun 
 and moon and stars; or you utilize the laws which 
 he has made, like the law of cause and effect, the 
 law of gravity, the law of the seasons, etc.; or 
 you use those powers of your own which are his 
 gift, the powers of body and mind and personal- 
 ity; or you work with other human beings who 
 are made by him. 
 
 You work much with him unconsciously. But 
 if you should do all that I have been speaking 
 of consciously, aware of the Source of all, de- 
 lighting in your Colaborer, it would take on a 
 new interest and value to you and its effect on 
 others would be greater. But there are things 
 that you cannot do at all unless you work with 
 him consciously. You accomplish things you 
 would never think of undertaking at all except 
 that you know he and you are working at that 
 task—bringing people to their Saviour, comfort- 
 ing the troubled, discipling the souls of people, 
 and perfecting them in Christ. You take his Son 
 into your life. His Spirit transforms you. His 
 word enlightens you as you seek to do his will. 
 The common work he and you do establishes 
 contacts between you. You respond to him and 
 
 [ 167 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 receive his power. You obey him and get the 
 shock of his will. You associate with him in 
 work, and that brings you the power ee his 
 thought and heart. 
 
 Some Suggestions 
 
 1. Make every task you do, even the most 
 material, a conscious participation with him im 
 some purpose of Mis, as Paul says, ‘ Whether, 
 therefore, ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, 
 do all to the glory of God.” There is nothing 
 on earth you may do in any calling that is not a 
 work of partnership with God. Make that fact a 
 part of your consciousness and enjoy it to the 
 full. 
 
 2. As he does nothing without calling us into 
 partnership with him, get as deep into lis work 
 as he will allow you to go. It is simply glorious. 
 “We are laborers together with God” in every- 
 thing that he does for men. Working with his 
 wisdom and love and strength you become en- 
 dowed with them. 
 
 [168 
 
V 
 
 SOME THINGS THAT HELP 
 
 1. The Church 
 
 There is first of all the help that comes from 
 the church asa whole. That body of people with 
 their enterprises and virtues reenforces you at 
 every point. The consciousness of being a part 
 of it, a vital part at that, exhilarates, warms, in- 
 tensifies, guides you. It is as if you were the 
 inlet of a great ocean whose tides sweep through 
 
 you. 
 
 Here are three things you must by all means 
 do, with conscience and high purpose and the 
 greatest possible intelligence: 
 
 (1) Attend the meetings of the church—all of 
 them. If there is one of them that you must 
 neglect, let it be the one that can most easily 
 spare you. But do not select one for neglect, un- 
 less it is simply imperative. There are all sorts 
 of reasons, given by a great many different men, 
 for attending church, from men like Roosevelt, 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Gladstone, and—well, 
 the list is too long to try to give. 
 
 You can see some of those reasons instantly 
 and can feel them all as soon as they are men- 
 tioned. They appeal to your reason, to your 
 heart’s love, to your higher self-interest, to your 
 
 [ 169 | 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 fidelity, to your patriotism, to your community 
 interest, to your ambition to become the best 
 person you can, to your honor, to your comrade- 
 ship with your fellow Christians. 
 
 You get truths that you need. 
 
 You get fervor and motive for your tasks. 
 
 You get pleasure that you cannot get anywhere 
 else. : 
 
 You get protection against your perils, seen 
 and unseen. 
 
 You get the love of people. 
 
 You get the help of people. 
 
 You get opportunities for work. 
 
 You find your work. 
 
 But, as much as you get, you give still more, 
 and that is the better thing of the two. 
 
 You give cheer to those who are there. 
 
 You cheer the preacher. 
 
 You find some one, now and then, who would 
 have been desolate all his life, but for what you 
 said or offered him there. 
 
 You give your church a rating in the com- 
 munity by attending. 
 
 You prove to all that there is such a thing as 
 fidelity, and that is needed in the community. 
 
 You help some one else to find his work. 
 
 You not only escape that miserable feeling that 
 you have not been square with the people with 
 whom you have a standing engagement to go to 
 church, but you encourage all the other members 
 to be square and you help. When you go, sit with 
 members of your own family. If there are chil- 
 
 [ 170 ] 
 
Some Things That Help 
 
 dren with you, keep them in the pew with you, for 
 there is the greatest sort of need of teaching them 
 to worship together both as a family and as part 
 of the group which constitutes the church. If 
 the younger members of the family seat them- 
 selves in church according to their caprices or 
 their changing comradeships, they fail to grow 
 into the right habits of social worship and private 
 worship. You cannot pray alone unless you 
 sometimes pray with others, nor can you pray 
 well in a social meeting unless you can pray 
 alone. There is a multitudinous element in us 
 that requires that we meet in the congregation 
 with others of like mind, and there the younger 
 _ members of the family must learn reverence and 
 the expression of it. 
 
 (2) Not only attend the church, but support 
 it, support it with an intelligent and true con- 
 science, with system and with good cheer, giving, 
 as it may need your support, according to your 
 ability. The support of the church is investing 
 rather than giving; it is a way of securing to 
 _ yourself and to your kindred the greatest of all 
 values. In another chapter I have spoken of the 
 moral value and the right use of money. 
 
 (3) Bear your own personal part in the wor- 
 ship at the meetings of the church. Sing in the 
 choir if you have that sort of talent. Teach or 
 act as an officer in the Sunday school, if you are 
 fitted for it and are asked to do so. Lead in 
 prayer or even lead a meeting when it is suitable. 
 Fit yourself for any or all of these duties. 
 
 [171 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 The midweek meeting for prayer has been 
 rightly called the thermometer of the church. 
 You cannot be so gifted by nature or so developed 
 in your Christian character that you will not 
 need the help you can gain at the prayer-meeting. 
 You can never live among a people who will be 
 so perfect as not to need the help that you can 
 give them by going to the prayer-meeting. There 
 you try out the promises of God; you learn the 
 deepest lessons of all; you find the deepest needs 
 disclosed ; you come into touch with people whom 
 you can help in special ways—burdened, anxious, 
 discouraged, undisciplined, willing, helpful peo- 
 ple. Your own needs will disclose themselves at 
 the prayer-meeting as at no other meeting, and 
 you will find help coming to you. 
 
 2. The Denomination 
 
 You get help from the whole body of the 
 church through your consciousness of being a 
 vital part of it; but you must cultivate the deep 
 consciousness of being a part of the great denom- 
 ination which has achieved such a glorious task 
 and is now engaged in such glorious world-wide 
 enterprises. “‘I am a part of that body,’ you 
 say to yourself, and you feel glad and grateful 
 and hopeful and purposeful. 
 
 Inform yourself about all the doings of the 
 denomination, its enterprises and problems. Do 
 that by reading the denominational papers, by 
 becoming acquainted with just as many of the 
 general and local leaders as you can, and by at- 
 
 [172] 
 
Some Things That Help 
 
 tending the larger meetings. Be sure to attend 
 the annual sessions of the Association to which 
 your church belongs. Go to the State or Province 
 meeting as often as possible. Make it a point to 
 attend the general convention. 
 
 3. Friends 
 
 You get special help from your more intimate, 
 personal friends. Some of them are in your home 
 church. They encourage you by their example. 
 They help you to see the things you have in com- 
 mon. That enriches you. They join with you 
 in your common tasks, pass through campaigns 
 with you for the extension of Christ’s kingdom, 
 and contribute to your own development. You 
 work and plan and purpose and pray and worship 
 and war together till you become almost essential 
 to each other’s happiness. I have seen old com- 
 rades in the war for righteousness, who could 
 scarcely endure a day when they did not see 
 each other. One of the most beautiful sights in 
 the church is that of such friendships. And they 
 are common. 
 
 Find friends in the church. They will illus- 
 trate life for you. They will do team-work with 
 you. They will give you an opportunity to serve 
 them. They will show you how not todo. They 
 will adorn and honor you. 
 
 4. Literature 
 
 (1) The fugitive literature, periodicals. There 
 are at least three papers you should read every 
 
 [ 173 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 week. One is the denominational paper which 
 covers your territory. That will keep you in- 
 formed on what the denomination is doing. It 
 is the best assistant pastor any church can have. 
 If the paper costs you two dollars and fifty cents 
 a year, that is only five cents a week. If you 
 really cannot afford it, then go in with some one 
 else or several others and take it in partnership. 
 It would be difficult properly to value the work 
 done by those papers for the denomination and 
 for the general cause of Christ. Another is the 
 mission paper. Still another is the Sunday school 
 paper which not only gives expositions of the les- 
 sons, week by week, but discusses methods of 
 work in detail and guides you in your study and 
 in Sunday school work. The daily paper may be 
 read in a distinctly Christian way with important 
 results in your thought and usefulness. 
 
 (2) The more permanent literature, books. It- 
 is literally true that “of the making of books 
 there is no end.” You can get many of the books 
 of a general character at the public library. I 
 would often buy a good book of permanent value 
 to you as a Christian and as a church-member, a 
 book on the Bible, a book on some phase of the 
 Sunday school enterprise, a book on missions, a 
 book of biography, the life of some great man 
 or woman who has wrought for God and human- 
 ity. Accumulate a worker’s library. There are 
 so many books on all these subjects that a wise 
 selection is not difficult to make. Look over the 
 list at the bookstore. Confer with your pastor. 
 
 [ 174 ] 
 
Some Things That Help 
 
 
 
 Read the reviews in the papers. Consult with 
 some expert. There is always one book that is 
 the best of all. Get that one. Get the best one on 
 each line of study. Another suggestion: Borrow 
 books and read them, but be sure to return them. 
 Still another suggestion: Lend them as fast as 
 you get them read, and keep them going. 
 
 5. The Sabbath 
 
 The Sabbath is God’s answer to a fundamental 
 need of all men of every nation for one day in 
 seven for rest and opportunity to nurture the 
 higher life and to render the higher service to 
 each other. Jesus endorsed and restored it after 
 it had been terribly misused and also suffered 
 from disuse. ‘The civil Sabbath is on the same 
 day and is necessary. The law of rest for all is 
 necessary in order to have a day of rest for each 
 one. You must rest that day from habitual toil 
 unless your toil is some work of mercy or of 
 necessity as provided for by God and by the laws 
 of the land. And you must use the day as one 
 of rare opportunity. There are two shameless 
 abuses of the day, one from the pursuit of money- 
 getting and the other from the pursuit of plea- 
 sure. All sorts of perils threaten the very exis- 
 tence of the day. When it goes, homes will go, 
 governments will go, unselfishness will pass away 
 from the world. The Sabbath is an instrument 
 with which you work. Keep it sacredly. Use it 
 for the highest purposes of worship and religious 
 ministry. 
 
 [175 ] 
 
VI 
 DIFFICULTIES AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 
 
 Of course, there are difficulties in the way of 
 your complete success. Your work would not be 
 interesting or worth while if it was easy. 
 
 1. Difficulties 
 
 There are three classes of difficulties: Some 
 you find within yourself. You have limitations, 
 and you are keenly aware of them; in truth, the 
 uncomfortable fact is that you seem to become 
 more keenly aware of them all the time: limita- 
 tions on your talents, or on your culture, or on 
 your will-power, or on your whole-heartedness, . 
 or on the nobility of your ideals and thoughts 
 and ways. It may also be a limitation on your 
 reputation and standing, due to some sin or 
 blunder of yours of which you may, or may not, 
 be aware. It may be some natural fault of yours 
 which repels people or distresses them, a fault 
 like envy, or jealousy, or avarice, or impulsive 
 speech, or violent temper, or intolerance, or gos- 
 sip, or deceit—some natural tendency which you 
 have not learned how to subdue or exterminate. 
 It may be worse, or it may be the milder fault of 
 shyness, or morbidness, or tactlessness, if that 
 can be called a mild fault. There are so many 
 
 [ 176 ] 
 
Difficulties and Encouragements 
 
 difficulties within you. Two things should en- 
 courage you. One is that there is a way of cur- 
 ing them, and Christ has the cure in his posses- 
 sion. Get into right accord with him, and you 
 are safe. Another encouragement is that, when 
 people see that you are fighting a battle with 
 yourself and doing it in the right spirit, they will 
 applaud you and trust you. They will appreciate 
 you all the more for your nobility in making the 
 fight. Your success will be all the more dis- 
 tinguished for the difficulties overcome. If you 
 have done wrong, retract it and repair the wrong. 
 That will advance you in the esteem of all who 
 know about it. If your standing has been poor, 
 it will be all the better for your effort to regain 
 your right place. 
 
 Another group of difficulties 1s found in the 
 people in whose interest you work and in those 
 who work with you. All of them have faults, 
 possibly as bad as yours, possibly worse. Re- 
 member two facts—that God has done something 
 for you and therefore he can do much for them 
 and through them; also that it takes time to get 
 results. So master yourself in the name and by 
 the power of Christ, and work on. 
 
 Another set of difficulties 1s m the circum- 
 stances in which you work. The ethical and so- 
 cial habits of the community may be against you. 
 Perhaps the people are pleasure-mad or society- 
 mad or money-mad. There may be marked skep- 
 ticism or irreligion in the life of the people. 
 Estrangements and enmities may divide the com- 
 
 [177] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 munity, or some of the families of the commu- 
 nity, or even members of the same families. The 
 level of culture may be low, interest in the things 
 of the spirit subordinated to interest in the things 
 of the letter or of the flesh. The number of 
 Christians may be so small compared with the 
 rest of the population as to make you and your 
 associates feel lonely and insufficient. The social 
 or financial importance of the people outside the 
 churches, or their culture; or their natural traits 
 may seem to put you and the other Christians at 
 a disadvantage. It may even be possible that you 
 are poorly adjusted in some one element of your 
 relational life and you feel that it is a fatal handi- 
 cap. Whether you have these peculiar difficul- 
 ties or not, you have the sinful nature that is 
 common to all men to contend with and to 
 overcome. 
 
 2. Encouragements 
 
 If God saved you and your associates 1m work, 
 he surely ought to be able to accomplish his pur- 
 pose for those in whom you are interested. They 
 may not be less promising than ‘ some of you.” 
 Remember how Paul recounted the awful vices 
 of the people at Corinth and then said, “ And 
 such were some of you, but ye are washed,” etc. 
 Cheer up. 
 
 Again, remember that your Christian character 
 is the most powerful human means which God 
 uses at all. Live the life well, and you will make 
 an impression on your environment, however ob- 
 
 [ 178 ] 
 
Difficulties and Encouragements 
 
 
 
 stinate and obdurate. Even though in your rela- 
 tional life there be adverse elements, they cannot 
 withstand you and Christ combined, especially 
 when the Spirit of God dwells within you, in- 
 forming you, energizing you, directing you, build- 
 ing you up in Christ. If you are Christlike, your 
 character will flow along the channels of your 
 connection with people in the domestic, religious, 
 social, business, educational relations in which 
 you live. 
 
 Also, remember that this enterprise of yours 
 as a Christian is God’s. It was his before you 
 made it yours. He initiated it. He first saw the 
 goal you are driving for, away off yonder. It is 
 his purpose you are carrying out. The plan on 
 which you work is his plan. The power with 
 which you work comes from him. His presence 
 is assured and is a fact every minute you are at 
 work in thought or ideal or act. His partnership 
 is what gives coherence and continuity and stabil- 
 ity to both you and your work. ‘“ We are God’s 
 fellow laborers,” says Paul to the Corinthians. 
 Said Jesus in the book of Revelation to John, 
 “He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit 
 down with me in my throne, as I also overcame 
 and sat down with my Father in his throne.” 
 “Your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” Others 
 will help you to succeed, “finish what you begin 
 and what you fail of win,” as the lines have it. 
 “ Wherefore, . . let us lay aside every weight, . . 
 and let us run with patience the race that is set 
 before us, looking unto Jesus.”’ 
 
 [ 179 ] 
 
You and Your Church 
 
 This is your deepest and dearest thought: 
 
 I ask no heaven till earth be thine, 
 
 No glory crown while work of mine 
 Remaineth here. 
 
 When earth shall shine among the stars, 
 Her sins wiped out, her captives free, 
 Her voice a music unto thee, 
 
 For crown new work give thou to me; 
 Lord, here am I. 
 
 [ 180 ] 
 

 

 

 
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