The Apostle sends out his desires and prayers so as to encircle the same
area as the grace of God covers and as His love enfolds. And we are
bound to do the same.
I am not going to talk about organic unity. The age for making new
denominations is, I suppose, about over. I do not think that any sane
man would contemplate starting a new Church nowadays. The rebound from
the iron rigidity of a mechanical unity that took place at the
Reformation naturally led to the multiplication of communities, each of
which laid hold of something that to it seemed important. The folly of
ecclesiastical rulers who insisted upon non-essentials lays the guilt of
the schism at _their_ doors, and not at the doors of the minority who
could not, in conscience, accept that which never should have been
insisted upon as a condition. But whilst we must all feel that power is
lost, and much evil ensues from the isolation, such as it is, of the
various Churches, yet we must remember that re-union is a slow process;
that an atmosphere springs up round each body which is a very subtle,
but none the less a very powerful, force, and that it will take a very,
very long time to overcome the difficulties and to bring about any
reconstruction on a large scale. But why should there be three
Presbyterian Churches in Scotland, with the same creed, confessions of
faith, and ecclesiastical constitution? Why should there be half a dozen
Methodist bodies in England, of whom substantially the same thing may
be said? Will it always pass the wit of man for Congregationalists and
Baptists to be one body, without the sacrifice of conviction upon either
side? Surely no! You young men may see these fair days; men like me can
only hope that they will come and do a little, such as may be possible
in a brief space, to help them on.
Putting aside, then, all these larger questions, I want, in a sentence
or two, to insist with you upon the duty that lies on us all, and which
every one of us may bear a share in discharging. There ought to be a far
deeper consciousness of our fundamental unity. They talk a great deal
about 'the rivalries of jarring sects.' I believe that is such an
enormous exaggeration that it is an untruth. There is rivalry, but you
know as well as I do that, shabby and shameful as it is, it is a kind of
commercial rivalry between contiguous places of worship, be they chapels
or churches, be they buildings belonging to the same or to different
denominations. I, for my part, after a pretty long experience now, have
seen so little of that said bitter rivalry between the Nonconformist
sects, _as sects_, that to me it is all but non-existent. And I believe
the most of us ministers, going about amongst the various communities,
could say the same thing. But in the face of a cultivated England
laughing at your creed of Jesus, the Christ, the Lord; and in the face
of a strange and puerile recrudescence of sacerdotalism and
sacramentarianism, which shoves a priest and a rite into the place where
Christ should stand, it becomes us Nonconformists who believe that we
know a more excellent way to stand shoulder to shoulder, and show that
the unities that bind us are far more than the diversities that
separate.
It becomes us, too, to further conjoint action in social matters. Thank
God we are beginning to stir in that direction in Manchester--not before
it was time. And I beseech you professing Christians, of all Evangelical
communions, to help in bringing Christian motives and principles to bear
on the discussion of social and municipal and economical conditions in
this great city of ours.
And there surely ought to be more concert than we have had in aggressive
work; that we should a little more take account of each other's action
in regulating our own; and that we should not have the scandal, which we
too often have allowed to exist, of overlapping one another in such a
fashion as that rivalry and mere trade competition is almost inevitable.
These are very humble, prosaic suggestions, but they would go a long
way, if they were observed, to sweeten our own tempers, and to make
visible to the world our true unity. Let us all seek to widen our
sympathies as widely as Christ's grace flows; to count none strangers
whom He counts friends; to discipline ourselves to feel that we are
girded with that electric chain which makes all who grasp it one, and
sends the same keen thrill through them all. If a circle were a mile in
diameter, and its circumference were dotted with many separate points,
how much nearer each of these would be if it were moved inwards, on a
straight line, closer to the centre, so as to make a circle a foot
across. The nearer we come to the One Lord, in love, communion, and
likeness, the nearer shall we be to one another.
_EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE_
ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.
FIRST AND SECOND PETER
AND FIRST JOHN