A False Christian Liberty
By Editor
H. W. Beecher, in the Christian Union, predicts that in the near future there is to be a great advance in Christian liberty and church life. The bondage to ordinances, such as baptism, the Lord's supper, and the Sabbath, will largely cease, he thinks, and Christians will generally come—as he says he has already come—not to disregard these ordinances altogether, indeed, but to sit loosely to them or consider them not of binding obligation or as necessary to salvation. Christians are coming, he says, to take a larger view of the Sabbath and to devote it more to social life and enjoyment. Those who take this enlarged and liberal view regard music and "amusements of all kinds" to be "as sacred as prayer or as baptism, if held in the right spirit, with a deep and profound sense of the divinity of things in human life." For himself, he adds, if he does not work in his field on Sunday, it is not because he thinks it would be "violating God's law" to do so, and if he abstains from wine, it is not because he considers it a sin to drink it. Is this the kind of liberality so much desired and talked about in our day?!