Christianity’s Claim of Catholicity
By Editor
IN the opening sermon at the late Congregational Council, Professor George P. Fisher, of Yale College, said:— “A distinctive merit claimed for the Christianity of our time is its catholicity. A just claim it is, as if we stand in the temple and pray, ‘We thank Thee we are not as other men in the olden time were—avenging dissent, hunting down error as we now pursue burglars, invoking the hand of power to crush schismatic Donatists.’” In view of the fact that within this very year, in Arkansas, Christians (?) and preachers on Sunday deliberately played the spy upon Seventh-day Adventists, to see if they could not catch them at work that they might be prosecuted for breaking the “Christian Sabbath,” thus hunting down error exactly as they would pursue burglars; in view of the loud and almost universal invocation of the “hand of power to crush” those schismatics who will not keep Sunday; the justice of the prayer framed by the Professor is equaled only in that of the self-righteous Pharisee to whom undoubted reference is made.