Here for ill.u.s.tration are two old people living in a miserable cabin in a reeking, malarial swamp with a dozen children drinking in the poison of their environment. What folly to spend time and money on the father or mother. How inefficient any effort to save the children just one by one. Get to work at once and drain the swamp, drive out the poisonous and infectious insects with which the place is swarming, fill in the land with fine clean earth, plant flowers and sow seeds of fruitful harvests, let the salt sea blow in and breathe across the spot.

The old people may die, in all probability they will, but under right and sanitary conditions the children will grow up into vigorous elements of a strong and worthful society.

Why spend time, money, heart and enthusiasm in seeking to overcome or straighten out and make correct the bent lives that have come down to us through the unsanitary moral conditions of a previous generation? We have had wretched laws, desperate customs, children have grown up under them to become fathers and mothers of generations no better than themselves.

It is neither economy of mind nor matter, so the modernists teach, to build mission houses, gather the people, old and young, and frighten them with the thought that when they die they shall pa.s.s into an environment worse than the one in which they are endeavouring to eke out a handicapped existence. Let us do the wise thing--go not so much to the prayer meetings, but to the legislatures, get bills pa.s.sed, laws made that will drive out the false and disastrous conditions now obtaining; legislate so that it will no longer be possible for people to drink themselves drunk, steep themselves in drugs, smoke themselves yellow with tobacco, yield to the fascination of gambling in any form. Let society be cleaned from these evils and the result will be certain. A generation that shall never see a saloon, a bottle of wine or whiskey; a generation that will never know the meaning of rum and tobacco and will never see a house of ill fame will be a generation that must grow up in righteousness and truth. There will be no more drunken brawls, no multiplied lawlessness, no diseased bodies, no moral leprosy. The world will be safe for each individual. Each individual will have a saved, moral life here, a life lived in obedience to the laws of nature, and as the laws of nature are the laws of G.o.d, in obedience to G.o.d. And what danger can the hereafter, if there be such a thing as the hereafter, hold for any one who is so obeying the laws of G.o.d?

Get society right and the individual will become right.

That is the modern Gospel.

That is the message to a needy world:

"Get society right and the individual will become right."

I do not interject here in full testimony the nevertheless fact that such a pagan city as Rome, or licentious Corinth or idolatrous Ephesus were lifted into cleanness and moral decency, not by legislative action, by reorganization of local conditions, but by the regeneration of one individual at a time until the divine sanity and personal spirituality enthroned in them built up societies, a.s.semblies of such heaven-given health that the old social conditions were overthrown; so overthrown by the personal Gospel Paul preached that throughout Asia Minor the people had been turned away from the worship of their G.o.ds, in Ephesus the temple of Diana was largely deserted and the craftsmen who made the silver, souvenir images of the G.o.ddess complained their business was almost at an end.

Strangely enough the advocates of this social Gospel set up the individual life of the Son of G.o.d as the means by which society is to be made right; but they set up, not the life He is living now as the risen, glorified G.o.d-man; on the contrary the life He lived before He died, the character He exhibited as a social reformer and an exemplar in righteousness. Men, they say, are not to be saved by the death Christ died, but by the life He then lived. He is to be taken as the proof of the doctrine of evolution and the possibilities in the natural man. He is the most advanced son of G.o.d who ever lived. All other men are innately sons of G.o.d, but undeveloped.

The fact of Christ, it is said, is a sublime encouragement to any man. He has only to copy Him in His words and deeds to find the divine life unfolding. Get away from the sacrificial Christ, this modern Gospel teaches, to the social Christ, the Christ who was interested in the poor and needy and who arraigned wrong social conditions; take the att.i.tude of Christ in relation to the evil of His times and with Him as the inspiration inst.i.tute right legislation and right social conditions and the world will soon approach the condition of heaven on earth.

This is the infidellic drive of Protestantism today.

Protestantism has come down from the plane of the supernatural to the plane of the natural.

Every day Protestantism is becoming more and more a society for compet.i.tive morality.

In short, the Protestantism of the hour is a combination of religiousness, civilization, Christianity, socialism, pagan philosophy, unitarianism and the energy of the flesh.

Nor need we be startled at this as though some strange thing had taken place. Long ago the Apostle warned us that it would be necessary to preach the Word in season and out of season--just as a watchman is under bonds to flash light in the darkness--because the time would come when the Church should have a form of G.o.dliness, but denying the power thereof; when it would not endure sound doctrine, but in obedience to the itching of the flesh should heap to itself teachers who should endeavour to respond to these worldly demands; teachers who in the end should turn the people away from the truth and turn them to the fictions and fables of men; teachers of whom the Apostle Peter warned who should bring in d.a.m.nable heresies, even denying the Lord who had bought them, teachers whom Jude foresaw would creep in unawares.

Men who consult the chart of a seacoast which marks the place of breakers and treacherous, hidden ledges, now and then thrust out through the white foam like the gleaming sharp teeth of waiting sharks, are not startled when they see the surf breaking at the indicated spot and hear the roar of the waters where it was announced they should lift up their thunder; they are not surprised, instead their confidence in the accuracy of the chart is emphasized.

Likewise when those who have read the forecast in Holy Scripture, while they may feel a certain grief at the facts as they are, rejoice when they see these things that even the failure of man as man and the betrayal of committed trust bear witness to the accuracy of Holy Writ.

With all its failure the professing Church still claims to be the kingdom of Christ on earth and a.s.serts its determination to rule the world. Rome holds to the idea with unfailing faith and with consistent Jesuitical and political scheming is moving forward with united front to temporal sovereignty. Protestantism with its new watchword of a "reorganized world" is making all its plans to attain the place of power by social, moral and political means.

What would be said of a queen who entered into partnership with men whose hands were still red with the blood of her murdered husband and rejected king? What could be said but that she had wholly forgotten or proved totally false to the principles for which her husband had died?

What shall be said of a Church which seeks to enter into partnership with a world that slew her Lord; which under all the smile and smoothness of moral, social and philosophical phrases and all the hypocritical laudations of His human character rejects His deity and hears in His cry of agony on the cross the proof that He was only a man who failed as other men have failed at the last.

Such a Church as that has lost the vision of its true att.i.tude during the absence of its rejected Lord and is well-nigh to forfeiting its commission.

Over the professing Church is sounding to-day with ominous significance the Apostolic words of warning:

"What, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with G.o.d; and that whosoever will be the friend of the world, is the enemy of G.o.d?"

The Corinthian Church attempted to take the place of rulership in the world.

With keen and biting words the Apostle rebukes them.

Thus he writes to them:

"Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to G.o.d ye did reign, that we might also reign with you."

Then he adds by way of contrast:

"I think that G.o.d hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels and to men."

It is this same apostle who under the inspiration of the Spirit in his second epistle writes to Timothy:

"If we suffer, we shall also reign with him."

It is not while her Lord is the crucified and rejected that the Church is to reign and rule over the world. Not while He is seated on His Father's throne in heaven and His own throne on earth is cast down and trampled in the dust. Nay! if the Church is faithful she will walk in separation from the world. If the Church is faithful she will testify against the world, not testify merely against certain abuses, but against the world as a system, that it is built upon the principle of the enthronement of self and not G.o.d, the exaltation of the flesh and not spirit.

If the Church shall be faithful and like Noah in the building of his ark condemn the world; if the Church will take up earnestly the solemn truth of G.o.d and warn men that no matter how good a government may be established by human means, no matter what culture and morality may fill the earth, no matter to what extent advance may be made in art, in science, nor no matter how safe a place the world may be made to live in, no matter to what heights of natural morality and righteousness man as man may attain, the judgment of G.o.d against this system of man called the world is certain, and that He will arise in His majesty to shake terribly the earth, and that only the things that are built on G.o.d can remain, the Church will suffer and be rejected even as was her Lord.

The Church is to be faithful to the testimony of Christ and enter into the fellowship of His sufferings.

The day of her triumph will come.

She is yet to rule over the world.

The hour and the circ.u.mstances are fixed.

Listen, I pray you, to the words of the Spirit as He speaks through the Apostle Paul:

"When Christ who is our life shall appear--then (and not till then) shall ye also appear with Him in glory."

Only when Christ shall come to take to Himself His long deferred rulership can the Church enter into her rulership over the world. In the fifth chapter of the Revelation you have the new song of the Church, the song of redemption and rule.

This is the triumphant song; it is a song of praise addressed to the Son of G.o.d Himself:

"Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to G.o.d by thy blood, out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation:

And hast made us unto our G.o.d kings and priests; and we shall reign on the earth."

But mark the moment when that song is sung, the occasion of occasions!

It is at that supreme moment when as the Lion of the tribe of Judah yonder in His risen and glorified humanity in heaven He steps forward, Son of man, king of the Jews and king of Israel to take the t.i.tle deeds of His kingdom from the hand of the Father; that moment when He is getting ready to cast His judgments on the earth and come forth as in the days of Noah to sweep away all iniquity and unrighteousness. It is at this moment when He is about to take to Himself His great power and descend in judgment glory that the Church bursts forth into her song of redemption and rule.

It is at the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ alone that the Church will enter upon her function of rulership over the world. She cannot reign till He comes and puts her in the place of His queen and in a.s.sociated power with Himself.

And because I want to see the Church lifted up out of social, political and fleshly partnership with the world; because I want to see the Church in the place of authority and power making and fulfilling the edicts of G.o.d; because I want to see the Church so exalted into the place of rulership that all the nations shall walk in the light of her excellency, her righteousness and holiness; and because this high and glorious state will be attained alone at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ I preach His Second Coming.

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