No Compromise with Sin by James R. Day

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 8, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 41.

No Compromise with Sin.

By James R. Day

[From baccalaureate sermon preached in Syracuse, N. Y., on Sunday, June 8, 1902, by James R. Day, LL.D., Chancellor of Syracuse University.]

“For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” 2 Cor. 6:14.

The Lord never has made compromise with sin that holiness might become more effective; never has made concessions to forms of iniquity that He might get a right of way for forms of truth. He gave in the beginning and always has given unmixed truth. The commandments are unqualified and for all. His people were a peculiar people and separate. They were not allowed for purposes of what sometimes seemed wise expedients to join with outside peoples, or to partake of anything heathen at whatever profit. Again and again they were miserably slain for forgetting this. It was a long discipline of undeviating, uncompromising truth. In the new kingdom the principle is laid down clearly, “Be ye separate.” “What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” The great expounder of that kingdom, who illustrated its spirit in His life and set forth its teachings with a greater fulness than any other, said, Shall we do evil that good may come? God forbid.

Doctrine That the End Justifies the Means Repudiated.

Righteous people are still a peculiar people. Their code is a high and holy one. It is not one of expediency. They are to do right, and only right. They are to do nothing, have nothing, go nowhere, that is not right. Intelligent Christians always have repudiated the thought that the end justifies the means. Christ did not practise it. He did not teach it. His Gospel squarely antagonized the evils of the world, and that was what made it unpopular. It was an age in which many religions were tolerated at Rome. Christianity was not. It was uncompromising. It did not try to conform to usages or to incorporate them if they had any mixture of evil. It faced them with a bold front and overthrew them. It was only when its teachers became sunken and corrupted and blinded by personal ambition, power, luxury, that it affiliated with the world. And you know the history.

The story of darkness, the Middle Age story, is a familiar one. The church got in a hurry and incorporated heathenism, and brought in as a compromise many of its views, tastes, and forms. Instead of being content to let the leaven work, it took the coarse meal unleavened and tried to work it without leaven. It got in a hurry for the mass of mankind—rulers, tribes, nations, whose peoples were accommodated with a place in the church of Christ, without its spirit or character, with no affinity or likeness or sympathy. Was it a wise and prudent policy? It seemed to pay. It made converts. Christianity seemed to succeed marvelously. The heathen became heathen Christians. There were plenty of them—heathen priests at the altars and heathen worshipers. But they all called Christ, Lord. That was the gain. They were the same old characters, but they called themselves by the Christian name. You know the result. Civilization was set back a thousand years.

We have learned that Christianity must have the Spirit of Christ. It can not compromise. It must stand for purity, for separateness. For nineteen centuries a minority has uttered its protest against compromise with sin. Its voice has rung out in unmistakable tones, at the price of life and reputation and this world's goods. The Christian Church to-day stands for that principle, is that protest.

Its mission is to purify the world. Not to lessen evil, but to extirpate it; not to change its form, but to annihilate it in all forms; not to mix it in, in moderate quantities, and absorb it, but to destroy it root and branch. Its Golden Text is, “Be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The attitude is absolute. The power is not an adjustment of worldly prudence and expedients, but the regenerative life and light of the divine Gospel, in a soil cut through and turned up and torn apart by the gleaming plowshares of the commandments. These prohibitions are sent ahead. And the commandments and the regenerating power of the Gospel co-operating, clean of all forces and forms of sin, are the hope of the world's salvation.

Christianity Can Not Compromise with Sin.

Christianity as compromise with sin, even a little of it, even a modified form of it, is impossible to your thought. That is not the Christianity which you have been taught. It must be all clean and separate institutionally from all uncleanness of every kind. It must not institutionally bear the name or take on any form of those things which harm men. It must avoid the very appearance of evil. You insist that it shall stand far and away and apart from those practises that are tracked through the ages by wrecked homes, ruined manhood, graves of shame, lost souls. From all this it must be as widely separate to your thought as heaven is from hell. As well put spots on the sun to overcome the darkness of midnight as to mix into Christianity the institutions and practises that curse the race, in order to relieve the race of such curses.—Christian Advocate.