Truth in the Keeping of Minorities.
THE true course of historical development is not always with the majority, whether in the church or in humanity in a more general view. It is sometimes with the minority, and that a very small one, while the great body is corrupt. In the church of Sardis, Christ had "a few names who had not defiled their garments," while the church in general "had a name that it lived and was dead." Truth must not be put on the issue of a popular vote. If we cannot acknowledge her except in a majority, we must inevitably have gone with "the world of the ungodly," and pronounced Noah a wrong-headed agitator. We must have decided the idolatrous nations to be in the right, and the solitary emigrant from Ur in the wrong. We could not surely have sided with Elijah when in the cave of Horeb he was, to all appearance, left alone, and "all Israel had forsaken the covenant of the Lord;" nor with Jeremiah "in the pit," or "the low dungeon," against the elders, princes, and fathers of the Jewish church and government. How could we have espoused the cause of the Baptist or of the Redeemer himself, against all the dignitaries of the ancient church, or have taken part with early Christianity, when the Jews called it heresy, and the Greeks despised it as foolishness, and the Romans denounced and drove out its professors as atheists and enemies of the human race, and it was everywhere spoken against, and its most illustrious teachers were accounted as the filth of the earth and the offscouring of all things? Yet Christianity was as true, and holy, and divine then, when the wise men after the flesh, the mighty, and the noble were all on the other side, and none but the foolish, the weak, the base and despicable things of the world were to be found among its disciples—as it is now, when it animates the civilization of the world and (nominally at least) controls the power of the mightiest nations, and rivers, cities, islands, and cathedrals are called after the once despicable names of its early ministers. O, we must seek some truer test of truth than the popular voice or the approval of the world in any form, or our very allegiance to truth may turn out to be nothing better than servility to man, and our high hopes of acknowledgement and reward at last be confounded by that terrible question, "Hast thou done these things at all unto me, even unto me, saith the Lord?"—Sel.