Concessions of the Church to the World.
There are practical concessions which are even more to be dreaded than any speculative laxities. It is one thing to decline asceticism, it is another thing to live in an almost unbroken round of business and pleasure, with only the fewest and most weary moments for prayer and benevolent effort, and the work of the kingdom. Of course amusements are needful for the young and the mature; but this necessity cannot be appealed to in excuse of the excitements, which are only varied as winter passes into summer and the tide of fashion rolls from the city to the country. It is a solemn truth, and not a piece of asceticism, that they who live in pleasure are dead whilst they live. The earnestness and aspirations of the sanctuary utterly fail, in a multitude of instances, of any realization in the daily lives of avowed Christians. It would very often be hard to say what it is, save a peculiar creed or ritual, that distinguishes the multitude of believers in the Gospel from the Jew, or the Mohammedan, or the Hindoo; certainly it is not a higher tone of living, an elevation of aims and tastes, an enlargement of the spiritual and moral nature, a refinement of the soul that makes a careless and self-indulgent life impossible. For man or woman, for youth or maiden, the Christian life is a grand enterprise; it involves self-renunciation—sacrifices of which the cross is the perpetual symbol. Its ways more excellent are often steep, rough, and narrow. Only when preachers and people find this out, and draw a clear, sharp line between the exceeding righteousness of the true Church, and an easy-going worldliness, does the word of Jesus become the great reality of life, so precious as to need no external commendation. We make concessions, we gather the half-converted into a communion and fellowship which we would fain regard as the Church, we substitute entertainment for instruction, and those who would have given themselves, body, soul, and spirit, to a Gospel of heroism and patience, become jaded critics in chapels of ease. Large demands are often far more attractive than concessions. We must kindle a great fire, unless we would be for ever tending it. Christianity lives in the world, upon condition that it is missionary and aggressive, a proclamation of the kingdom of God in a life of love.