USA > Illinois > Winnebago County > Rockford > Golden anniversary exercises, historical record and manual of the Second Congregational church, Rockford, Illinois. November 7, 1849. November 7, 1899 > Part 2
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Fifty years ago there were in the United States 38,000 church build- ings, the value of the church property was $87,000,000. Within these fifty years, while the population of the country has increased threefold, the number of church buildings has grown fourfold, the church membership sixfold and the value of church property sevenfold. The compiler of the last United States census reported the actual number of Sunday and week-night services, not including Sunday School sessions, as between fifteen and twenty millions a year. Well did he add, " those who would get some idea of the activities of the churches in promulgating the princi- ples of religion, must consider the tremendous significance of these conservative estimates."
But Christianity has the pages of not one but forty half centuries of its history and shows gains of rapidly increasing measure all through its two thousand years. During the first fifteen hundred years of its history, Christianity gained one hundred million adherents, and in one-fifth of that time, during the next three hundred years, it gained one hundred million more ; while within the single century now closing, it has gained two hun- dred and ten million more. That is, reckoning by general Christian popu- lations, we have gained as much within the last single century as in the whole of the preceding 1800 years. Taking it in the aspect of material power throughout the world, look at the momentous fact that there are un- Hist. Rec. 3.
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der Christian governments seven times as many of the world's population today as there were four hundred years ago.
Of Christian growth, of power, of sustained and accelerating growth and power, there is no question. What of the ideas, the plan, the means in the brain and heart of Jesus through which this vast growth was to be attained ? We do not seek to encompass such a theme. We glance only at a few aspects of it-those typified by the three words association, free- dom and truth.
" I will build my church," said Jesus. It was his purpose to establish the kingdom of God in human hearts, to save the world. For this purpose he had a method. His method was the creation of a new associated life. The association of his followers lay at the very foundation of Christ's king- dom. In its very structure he emphasized the power of assemblage. The Christian relation was not to be merely that of the solitary individual soul to the Master. It was to include the social nature of man. There was to be a community, an association, in a word, a church, as an integral factor in the formation of Christianity. While there was and is the presence of the Lord abiding in each single soul accepting his word, there was and is a more emphatic promise of his presence in those " gathered together in his name." No form of solitary or separate life, no method of individual de- votement to Christ, fulfils his plan; nothing can take the place of the Christian assembly.
Jesus planned to awaken a far vaster power than would reside in mere solitary discipleship. He would build his church by the assemblage of his friends and followers, for the church is the gathering of Christians. No church would be possible with the mere isolated and solitary relationship of separate human souls in Jesus Christ. Therefore into the very structure of his church is built the communion, the central and highest act of Chris- tian worship; and the communion is essentially an observance of social fellowship.
Loyalty to the church means loyalty to the central idea of the church, loyalty to the meeting, to the assemblage, the congregation, the society ; Christ plans for life intenstfied, elevated, ennobled by communion, fellow- ship with other lives.
I'do not say that the act of assemblage, in and of itself, is everything in the purpose of Christ when he speaks of building his association as the method of his kingdom. - But I do say that the assemblage, the church. is the means and the condition of its most powerful manifestation. The
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church edifice is not in itself everything of a church. but the church edifice, home, place, centre for the social life of the church and for its public wor- ship, is a powerful means for the efficiency and success of the organization. So the congregation of Christians together, is a vitalizing factor of Christ's plan. Literally, what he declared was, " I will build my congregation, my assembly, my meeting. It was not ecclesiasticism in the sense of form and polity, but the actual, frequent, pulsating assemblage of his friends that he emphasized.
No church can live on absences. With the vast majority of its mem- bers it is not the words they have said at meetings, it is not the things they have done at meetings, it is their presence in the meetings which has been the most powerful and continuous and influential service that they could render to the public and social work of their church.
A congregation is much more and other than the same number of people isolated and apart from one another. A congregation is more than an audience. The mind and heart are intensified into higher activities by social contact. When numbers are together, there are other means of in- fluencing the mind and will than those of speech. The words which are used are augmented manyfold by the very power of the assemblage Quite beyond the threadlike message coming from the lips of the speaker to those who listen, there are influences which stream from mind to mind and from heart to heart. Action and reaction surge backward and forward in elec- tric thrills, until often the speaker is lifted quite above his separate and in- dividual thought and purpose by the impulsion of the mass of humanity present with him. Persons who are not used to public speaking are likely to have an inadequate idea of the part which the hearer has in the speaking. It is the hearer who makes the speech to a far larger degree than is com- monly understood. The audience inspirits and encourages or depresses and drags the speaker. Individual persons in the audience, well known to the speaker, exert upon him all the power of their presence. His eye catches the face, his mind receives the impress of the character. Not seldom is the current of his speaking turned or intensified by the impression of a single hearer. Always in a gathering one experiences the power of personality. Every eye that catches his eye gives to the mind the sense of his presence, and with presence there comes the power of the person into the other life. Your regular, habitual, stated presence in gatherings frequently repeated and going on from year to year, is of itself a power. You pour into these meetings in increased momentum the influences which
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come from your being there, not once or twice or casually, but with the set intent and volume of a constant presence.
This is true of the church. Association, personal association, is its very being, Presence is power ; absence is protest. There are whole classes of people who are never at church ; there are other whole classes who are always at church. Each of these two classes is exerting its con- stant influence, and every individual Christian is joined to one side or the other by the frequency of his presence or his absence from the assembly of Christ.
FREEDOM. Nothing marks the originality of Christ's plan more dis- tinctly than the freedom with which he left his truth to his followers for varied and flexible development in their minds and hearts. While he em- phasized association, he also emphasized individualism, A vast variety of social organizations have sprung from his word and called themselves his churches. Usually each of them has sought to find its divine and exclusive title in his plan. But the truth is, he planned for them all. As individual Christians include wide varieties of culture, temperament, disposition, con- duct and character, so do Christian churches. Jesus made his followers free to associate themselves as they would, in supreme loyalty to him, and in fellowship as broad as his kingdom of love.
Jesus said nothing of those features of associated Christian life on which it might be imagined he would have laid supreme emphasis. He said, " I will build my church," but erected ho edifice, never placed one stone on another of an outward edifice. He said, "I will build my church," but left his followers free to make various forms of the social organization of the church. He put before them no creed, no compendium of doctrine, no form of worship; he set up no public service as a necessitated order of church administration. All these things were entrusted to the free move- ment of the minds of his followers.
· The Christian church has been free to include varieties of organiza- tion, differences of administration and oppositions of opinion from its first day to this. There was a supreme wisdom in the freedom which Jesus gave to his followers. The free adjustment of their individual differences was a priceless element in their training. The apostles differed from one another even to the extent of personal rebuke and partial separation. Among their followers there were constant differences of administration and a con- stant emerging of the higher Christian consecration. In the first days, as ever since, it was necessary to rebuke inordinate adherence to different
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leaderships, as compared with the great and dominant spirit of loyalty to the one Master. For from the very first there was constant Christian free- dom to organize along various lines, and the freedom and the fellowship of the one spirit in Christ. No uniform machinery could have done as much for the development of Christian activity and the growth of Christian cul- ture as the variety of administrations left open to the followers of our com- mon Lord. It is not that they have been permitted ; it is evident that they were provided for in the very structure of Christianity. The omissions of Christ as to church organization are as really divine as his precepts, and the freedom which he provides has been more useful for fellowship than any enforced uniformity.
Always routine and machinery are easier and simpler than thinking, considering, balancing, choosing, deciding for oneself what is right in per- sonal loyalty to Him who is our only master, even Christ. The routine plan of minute rules divinely embedded in the constitution of the church, would be defective just where real Christianity is strongest. The emphasis on great spiritual principles, the education of men into free, individual ap- plications of these principles to particular cases, develops the finer, higher, nobler, stronger, sweeter type of manhood and womanhood. A machine system would dwarf men into mere obeying machines. But Christianty developes them into free spiritual intelligences.
I venture to say that it has ever been far better to leave things in the up-building of Christian churches as we believe Christ has left them. It is better to develop the manly and womanly character than the childish char- acter. It is better to have varieties of thought among Christians than an enforced uniformity. The unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace between those who differ, is far better than any imaginary unity of the spirit in the bonds of an enforced uniformity of opinion.
The freedom which Jesus conserved in the upbuilding of his church is a freedom inspired with the broad spiritual principles of the Christian faith, and leading, through partial and imperfect processes of thought and conduct, to the highest truths. These come from the varying judgments of men, acting in the varying degress of the light they have ; but always alive, act- ing and growing. The education of one free being is worth the manufac- ture of a whole regiment of human machines, made not to think but merely to obey. Therefore the great apostle who was divinely called to write with his own hand so large a share of the entire New Testament, announced the principle of free and personal responsibility in applying the truths of religion
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to our own lives and conduct. He laid his shining axe at the very root of all the hierarchies and dominations and usurpations which have lorded it over the personal conscience in the realm of religion from that day to this. All sectarianisms are usurpations against personal Christian liberty. Essen- tially they displace personal freedom of conscience with their ordinances and rules made to limit the freedom and duty of the individual Christian in the making of his own belief and conduct with direct and simple responsi- bility to Christ. They undertake to improve upon Christianity by amend- ing it so as to meet a desire which Christ absolutely refused to satisfy. This is the desire to evade personal examination and decision by having ready- made a set of rules which abrogate the trouble of thought and prayer, by deciding a great many questions with authority, and giving laws in the name of God and Christ which have not been divinely announced.
In one word, it is the effort to make Christianity a system of the let- ter which killeth and not of the spirit which giveth life.
It is a common demand that there be more of machinery in religion. Men want exact rules, a routine to live by. As machinery in mechanics saves labor, so they think it would be a great saving in religion. It would save much wear and tear of individual and painstaking thought. But Christianity is constructed to inspire thought, awaken intellect, and to set the mind working out the problems of life and conduct. But there are a great many who want a religion so framed as to decide questions of duty in advance of their thought about them, in a machine way, automatically, so that they will not have the trouble of thinking them out. They say, " I want some- thing.to go by." Yes, and you shall have something to go by ; something grand, inspiring, ennobling. You shall not have a compendium of minute or- dinances. You shall not have a multitude of detailed rules, adjusted to each one of a myriad cases of questions of conduct. You shall not have a Bible constructed on the plan of the codified statutes of a legislature. You shall not have a church, set to supervise and manage your mind and life in their last details, a priesthood to whom you are to confess all and yield all, a series of ecclesiastical dominations, making human automata of men. You shall have faith with freedom and fellowship with fraternity. You shall have a grand, twofold principle, unified at its source as one, divided in its form to satisfy our twofold relation, and branching in its applications into infinity. You shall have the principle of Christian freedom in the posses- sion and use of all things. All are yours. You shall have this high prin- ciple written all over the Bible in lines of living light, illustrated in charac-
1
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ters, in actions, in providences, by contrarieties, by blessings, by retribu- tions, by precept, by parable, by analogy, by appeal-until the grand old book has become the vital library of religion to the world. You shall have it written in nature, flower, star, fruit, summer radiance, healthful tonicity of winter cold. You shall have it written in the very structure of your being, in every appetite, natural desire, instinctive enjoyment, every affection, pur- pose and effort, in the regal demands of conscience and the bliss of inward approval. You shall have it breathed in the inspiring influence of God on your soul, in his Fatherhood, his love, the sweep of his arm of justice and the sweet bending of his grace and mercy. All are yours : the world, life, death, things present, things to come. All are yours. Man, in the image of God and after his likeness, let him have dominion over the earth. " Thou hast put all things under his feet." Let him rejoice in his manifold pow- ers and susceptibilities. Let him develop the intelligent energies of his nature, let him ripen his rich and warm affections, let him explore and cul- tivate all parts of his being and of his environment. All are yours. Re- ligion cuts off not one of these germinant forces, but calls them all out and vitalizes them. All are yours : all voices of moral enlightenment and in- spiration, whether Paul or Apollos, Peter or John, Moses or David, Socra- tes or Plato, Zoroaster or Buddha, souls that have soared in the light of God, or groped in his darkness if haply they might find him, though he was not far from every one of them. All are yours : all poets from Homer and Isaiah to Keble and Whittier ; all preachers from John the Baptist to the Baptist Spurgeon. Wherever God's light shines, from sage or saint, prophet or poet, from the intricate reasoning of the philosopher to the dew- drop sparkle of the child's sweet word, all literature and life, all revelation, all art and industry and civilization, all are yours.
This is the largeness of the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. But is it a freedom of isolation, a solitary freedom for each individ- ual soul ? Is it not rather a freedom within the bonds of Christian fellow- ship ? "All ye are brethren." Social sympathy, social inspiration, com- fort and aid, the upbuilding of Christ's kingdom through the new social order, the assemblage of his followers in fraternal fellowship. These are as distinctly the second element in the plan of Christ, as individual freedom is the first. The freedom and fellowship are the two foci of the Christian ellipse. A freedom of the individual and of the church from any outward jurisdiction and control and a fellowship by which each member of the church has equal essential rights, powers and privileges with every other,
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and by which each individual church is on a level of inherent genuineness, dignity and authority with every other church on earth.
In what then consists the unity of Christianity ? In the truth, as it is in Jesus Christ. In the truth which he has breathed into the human heart the truth which he revealed and which he was and is. There is a unity of uniformity which is form, mere form. There is a unity in variety, which is life. The letter killeth. The words of Christ are spirit and they are life. In all its varied forms the real church of Christ bears witness to his truth.
Christ has come into the world with a message of truth. His purpose is the renovation of humanity. His way is the revelation of the truth from heart to heart and from life to life. His method is the social organism, the church. While all means may be used, the church is the very body of Christ. What did Christ say of His relation to the truth ? " To this end was l born and for this cause came 1 into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth." And he said, " I am come that ye might have life. I am the truth and the life." What then is the relation of the church to the truth ? It is the pillar and ground of the truth. It is sent to bear witness to the truth, the highest truth, the truth of life, for it is the church of the living God.
Standing on truth as exemplified in historical facts, the real church stands and must stand for the conservation of truth. Nothing is more con- servative than a fact. An actualty once set in history remains. It cannot
. be theorized away or undone. It is there and there to stay. And true con- servatism consists in the recognition and use of the actual facts of the past in their reality, their proportions and their reach towards the future. The roots of the present are in the past. We cannot cut loose from history. Certain great spiritual facts have proven their validity and their vitality throughout the centuries of human history. They were true when first re- vealed. They are not one whit less true to-day. From them Christianity has its present life and vigor. It does not let go of them. It does not weaken its hold upon them. They began with its life ; they are the sources of all its spiritual vitality. Christianity is a vital growth. Its church is not a mere stake pushed into the ground by the imprint of a few blows out of the present, and holding its upright position by the compression of a little surface earth about its foot. It is a living tree with deep, branching, nutri- ent roots, an expanse of boughs and abundant fruitage. As we believe in
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the fruit, the blossom, the leaf, the branch, so we believe in the roots. The church stands for a true conservatism of the past in the present.
But not the less does the church stand for progress in the knowledge of truth. There is no antagonism between a true conservatism and a true progress. Holding fast on what we have gained, does not conflict with our gaining more. That is a false conservatism which is afraid of growth, change, development. Christ came with a new revealing of truth, a reveal- ing which has been going on and working its way deeper into the human mind with every successive generation. Standing originally for the new truth when it came, the real church has always stood for progress. It be- gan in a revolt against a false and bigoted conservatism which rejected the new truth. It has grown into larger possession of the truth with every new generation. The spirit giveth the life. A false conservatism would nega- tive all truth, but the life-tree grows, changes, sends out new boughs and branches. There is constant development in vital growth from the princi- ples of Christianity. We are learning more, not less, of Christian truth with each generation. We know all that Calvin and Luther knew, all that Augustine and Clement knew; and we know more. The Holy Spirit is making larger revelation of divine grace and truth to every age, and the churches, associations of imperfect human beings, are coming into fuller possession of religious truth and larger measure of philanthropic Christian endeavor.
We do not claim that the Christian church of to-day does its duty or half its duty. We are not doing enough or half enough for men, for their souls or their bodies. Too many men are oppressed by poverty, too many poor children writhe in disease and die in destitution. Too many women are abused, desecrated, tortured and murdered. Too many drink shops lift their hideous fronts in city and village and crowd against the schools and churches. Too many soulless monopolies oppress honest labor and drive it into want and despair. We have learned only the alphabet of Christian civilization as yet. The relations of social right and duty are rudimentary as yet, imperfect. Against the greed of giant monopolies anarchy lifts its savage front, and neither of these proffers the final har- mony. The great governments of the world have not yet adopted the first principles in the supreme Christian civilization. The rude, barbaric law of force still dominates their councils. It is a sad spectacle, Europe thronged with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, withdrawn from honest industries and home happiness, to threaten each other in vast standing armies. Be- Hist, Rec. 4.
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fore the quiet tones of the International Peace Conference die away, wars awaken their storm of blood and fire, English wars in Africa, American wars in Asian islands. In the presence of these dark facts where is boast- ing ? It is excluded. But, my friend, what excludes it ? By what stand- ard do we see the faults and imperfections of this civilization of ours ? What is the light which reveals these blots and blotches? Is it from the putrid depths of ancient Phœnicia ? Is it out of the hard brutalities of old Rome that this revealing and rebuking light streams? From whence will you look down upon the evils of our imperfect Christian civilization? From ancient India, wringing the wealth of her princes out of the people that they might revel in shameless luxuries while the millions were left meagre with hunger, a prey to famines or rotting by myriads with the diseases of filth and want ? From stolid China or savage Africa or the languid stupor and sensuality of Micronesian islands ? No ; it is only as you take your stand with its Founder that you can find fault with the Christianity of our churches and peoples. It is only when you compare it with those eternal truths to which he gave highest expression, that you note its lapses. It is only as the light of the Christian ideal streams out of the New Testament over the modern Christian world, that it looks shadowy and dark. And they who stigmatize our Christian churches with their imperfections, discover those imperfections by the very light they seek to ignore and denounce.
It is the Christian progress of the past which holds in its hands the promise of the future. The very road by which we have come thus far, is the path which stretches its beckoning line of light out before us. Pro- gress is to come in the way it has come. Man is to be lifted higher by the power which has elevated him thus far. And that power is Christianity.
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