A DANGER IN THE CHURCH TO-DAY.
By Charles A. Dickenson
Such impulses are working in the church of Christ to-day, unconsciously, but yet tending to the same exclusive results as those witnessed on that train of cars. The church itself is in danger of becoming a special train on board of which the Christians are more exercised concerning their own comfort and destination than they are concerning the destination and comforts of the surging crowd outside. These things ought not to be. We see our weakness; we know that we are naturally selfish, that we often consider our personal comfort before the spiritual and temporal welfare of those about us; and yet there are times when we rise to the higher vantage ground of our faith, when a noble resolve moves us to do and to suffer for the salvation of men and the betterment of the world. Oh, how mean and insignificant our selfish selves seem as we stand at these lookout stations of our experience! We try to see ourselves as others see us, as the angels see us. I was standing on Mount Kineo a few weeks ago, a magnificent mass of solid hornblende, rising eleven hundred feet from the bosom of the lake, one side a perpendicular wall capped with beetling cliffs, which seemed ever ready to plunge into the inky waters that lie crumpled and trembling in a sort of Dantean gloom at their base. From the top of the wall I looked down upon the185lake and the curving shore. Boats like tiny eggshells, with their mites of humanity, floated here and there within the range of my vision. Men and women that looked like pigmies moved about on the land. The sensation was a strange one. The world seemed so large and men so small, I could not help exclaiming: "What is man that thou art mindful of him?" It takes but an altitude of half a mile to reduce him to the proportions of an ant; what must he seem from the altitude of heaven? An insect that lives his little day, that buzzes and circles over his bit of marsh or fen or glade, that struggles over his little mound of earth, collects his pile of glittering sand, and then lies down beside it to die, and be forgotten by a world that hardly knew he ever lived?—Ah, no, not this, I said, not this, except he be the smallest of the Creator's works,—a supremely selfish man! If such he be, living within self and for self, loveless and Christless, always getting and never giving, he shall at last lie down beside his gettings, and the lowly pile shall mark the stature of his manhood; but if the Spirit of Christ be his, if his personality be charged with the electric potency of love, he shall make for himself a place in God's world, the altitude of which shall not be measured by Ossa piled upon Kineo and Pelion upon Ossa. For when you are able to comprehend the breadth and length and height of the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, you shall know the stature of that manhood or womanhood which is filled and moved by that love. Measure yourself, my brother, by the cross to-day.—Rev. Charles A. Dickenson.