Christian Fellowship Beyond Society
By Editor
The Interior says that it would "admit a colored man to membership in our church without hesitation, provided there were no such church of his own accessible; but if there were, we would advise him to go to his own. If this be wrong, then there is no limit this side of the perfect fusion of the two races into a yellow mass inferior to either of them." The United Presbyterian calls this "strained reasoning." It is worse than that. It is based on the rapidly growing theory that the church is a society into which none but those of "our set" can be admitted, and that church fellowship is equivalent to admission into "good society." We pity those who have so limited an idea of what Christian fellowship means that they would receive none but those who have been as highly favored by nature as they. The apostle Paul says of those who have "put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him," that "there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; but Christ is all, and in all." What the churches need is more of Christ and less of "society."