Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 30, 1914

A Liberal Platform Surely

It was a liberal spirit of affiliation surely which the recent International Sunday School Association showed in its endeavor to cooperate with all classes in the work of home visitation. One of its resolutions, passed in the fourteenth annual session, held in Chicago, June 23-30, 1914, reads:—

We declare in favor of the cooperation of Protestants, orthodox and liberal, as also of Roman Catholics and Jews, in the great movement of Home Visitation wheresoever possible to operate the same in order to help children and adults alike into personal rightness with God and into social rightness with men.

Even some of the stanch friends of that association recognize that this is a liberality which oversteps Christian orthodoxy. Quoting this resolution, the Sunday School Times of July 18, 1914, says:—

Can we imagine the apostle Paul organizing a city-wide, house-to-house visitation in Ephesus, to be conducted by Christians in cooperation with the worshippers of Diana and of other pagan deities, and with the agreement on his part to turn over to the pagans the names of all children and grown people who preferred their worship, for them to bring into their temples and instruct, provided they would give the Christians the names of all who might prefer to investigate the Christian faith? Is it objected that the conditions were entirely different then? that there was no such body of Christians in any city as we have today? But is the underlying principle in any way different? Is the gospel less exclusively the way of life today than it was then? Are substitutes for the gospel safer now?