There are a great many other bonds that unite men together besides the
bonds of religious life or their absence. There are the domestic ties,
there are the associations of commerce and neighbourhood, there are
surface identities of opinion about many important things. The greater
portion of our lives moves on this surface, whore all men are alike.
'If you tickle us, do we not laugh; if you wound us, do we not bleed?'
We have all the same affections and needs, pursue the same avocations,
do the same sort of things, and a large portion of every one's life is
under the dominion of habit and custom, and determined by external
circumstances. So there is a film of roofing thrown over the gulf. You
can make up a crack in a wall with plaster after a fashion, and it will
hide the solution of continuity that lies beneath. But let bad weather
come, and soon the bricks gape apart as before. And so, as soon as we
get down below the surface of things and grapple with the real,
deep-lying, and formative principles of a life, we come to antagonism,
just as they used to come to it long ago, though the form of it has
become quite different.
Then there are other causes modifying this hostility. The world has got
a dash of Christianity into it since Jesus Christ spoke. We cannot say
that it is half Christianised, but some of the issues and remoter
consequences of Christianity have permeated the general conscience, and
the ethics of the Gospel are largely diffused in such a land as this.
Thus Christian men and others have, to a large extent, a common code of
morality, as long as they keep on the surface; and they not only do a
good many things exactly alike, but do a great many things from
substantially the same motives, and have the same way of looking at
much. Thus the gulf is partly bridged over; and the hostility takes
another form. We do not wrap Christians in pitch and stick them up for
candles in the Emperor's garden nowadays, but the same thing can be
done in different ways. Newspaper articles, the light laugh of scorn,
the whoop of exultation over the failures or faults of any prominent
man that has stood out boldly on Christ's side; all these indicate what
lies below the surface, and sometimes not so very far below. Many a
young man in a Manchester warehouse, trying to live a godly life, many
a workman at his bench, many a commercial traveller in the inn or on
the road, many a student on the college benches, has to find out that
there is a great gulf between him and the man who sits next to him, and
that he cannot be faithful to his Lord, and at the same time, down to
the depths of his being, a friend of one who has no friendship to his
Master.
Still another fact masks the antagonism, and that is, that after all,
the world, meaning thereby the aggregate of godless men, has a
conscience that responds to goodness, though grumblingly and
reluctantly. After all, men do know that it is better to be good, that
it is better and wiser to be like Christ, that it is nobler to live for
Him than for self, and that consciousness cannot but modify to some
extent the manifestations of the hostility, but it is there all the
same, and whosoever will be a Christian after Christ's pattern will
find out that it is there.
Let a man for Christ's sake avow unpopular beliefs, let him try
honestly to act out the New Testament, let him boldly seek to apply
Christian principles to the fashionable and popular sins of his class
or of his country, let him in any way be ahead of the conscience of the
majority, and what a chorus will be yelping at his heels! Dear
brethren, the law still remains, 'If any man will be a friend of the
world he is at enmity with God.'