science into that of temperament, taste and preference. But I submit that, while each Church has its prevailing character, these varieties are found within each denomination. In each denomination, congregations will be found which make their separate appeal to the learned and to the simple, to the restrained and to the emotional, to those who prefer a worship which is evangelistic, free and social, and to those to whom all this is distasteful, but whose spiritual life is helped by reverence, order and beauty. To the end of time these differences will persist, and they must be met. Now to conclude, it has been an obvious gain that the divisions of the Churches, sometimes when they have been most painful, have multiplied the activities and added to the sacrifices of organized Christianity. All the Churches have been propagandist. Whenever men link themselves with any cause they give to it far more of themselves and their means than they would to that for which they felt no personal responsibility. The vast structure of Nonconformity, with its sanctuaries in towns and villages and on the countryside, its immense and far-extended outward life incarnated in institutions of every kind, its voice which has gone out through all the earth-these have been the fruits of intense spiritual conviction and the passion to save men. Of course, lower motives have often been at work, and of these it is enough to 70 CHURCHES AT THE CROSS-ROADS say with the apostle, "Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife, and some also of goodwill. What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice." And as I think of the gains which have come to the Church through separation, I would not that any rude or sacrilegious hand should be laid upon that which centuries of prayer and toil have built up; rather I would say, in the spirit of the Second Interim Report, from which I have already quoted: "What we desire to see is a willing acceptance for the common - enrichment of the united Church of the wealth distinctive of each," and that there should be the continuity “of types of Christian thought, life and order, not only of value to themselves, but of value to the Church as a whole." 66 CHAPTER VI DENOMINATIONALISM-GAIN AND LOSS II 'Night is behind me and the day before-- THERE is a real parallel in many ways between the story of Puritanism and that of Pharisaism. The latter arose in Jewish history after the exile. Two centuries before Christ it was a great and noble system. The Jewish Puritans or Pharisees, as they were called, were separatists from the heathen tendencies and practices which had invaded Israel. Deeply in earnest and fearless in consistent obedience to the law, they drew to themselves the best moral and religious forces of the nation. Even in its deterioration, the system had powerful attractions for a great religious mind like that of Saul of Tarsus. But when Christ came the life had gone out of it. It had become formal and external. It rejected the baptism of John, and then it crucified our Lord. The story of Pharisaism is at least a warning to us that we may be holding to a shell or to a form from which the spirit has departed. I have set out some of the gains of that method of division which received its chief historic impulse from Puritanism. In my judgment we have reached a stage when the gains do not outweigh the loss. So far as English religious life is concerned, the era of division has spent its force and lost its moral appeal. (1) To begin with statistics. I have never been disposed to attach an undue importance to numerical losses. If it could be shown that there had been a qualitative advance even at the cost of a heavy quantitative decline, I should be greatly encouraged. No one pretends, however, that the decline in numbers has been the result of a stricter discipline, or that it has been accompanied by an increase of prayer and spirituality. Probably the very reverse of this is nearer the truth. It is not going well with any of the churches. If the remedy could be found in money, it would be provided at once. The machinery of some of the denominations has reached the utmost point of efficiency and completeness. What it has not been able to accomplish there is no reasonable ground for believing that it ever will accomplish. I think that one explanation of these disquieting facts lies in the inherent weakness of division. The following table of statistics is a very serious call to set our house in order, and to arrest a decline which otherwise involves that the denominations must slowly bleed to death : |