The Common Life
W. Carl Ketcherside
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"The union of Christian hearts is founded on a kindred being and a kindred life which has come to them through the Father. Home is the chief school of human virtue. There the fountains of love are unsealed, and the lessons of trust and mutual forbearance are taught, and thus the church when it touches its highest ideal is a home. Our personal life can only be fully developed in an environment of personal relations, and hence the value of the communion of the saints. As in every moment of our existence we are dependent on others, clinging to them for sympathy, and leaning on them for strength, so in the divinest relation of our life, we seek the fellowship of others who share in the same hope and are heirs of the same destiny." --Robert P. Downes in Pillars of our Faith(1893).
As I look back upon it, I think my life was typical of that of thousands of others in the Church of Christ. The magnificent dream of "a project to unite the Christians in all of the sects" had faded by the time I came along, and the movement which grew out of it had splintered and fragmented. Each faction thought of itself as the restored church. Each regarded those in every other party as either sectarians or extremists. Each narrow segment was a "brotherhood" of its own and this exhibited itself even in the language employed. Those who parroted the party line were always addressed as "Brother." One from another party was carefully introduced as "Mister." This very distinction was an eloquent proof of the narrow and bigoted attitude to which we clung as proof of our "faithfulness to Christ." When we spoke of "the brotherhood" we never thought of including the thousands of others who had received Christ but were in other factions than our own.
Many of our attitudes were cultural rather than spiritual. We were a frontier movement and the emotional overtones which framed the pioneer settlements helped to orient our thinking. For one thing we were a people of fierce loyalties, clinging together for mutual strength and support like settlers in a fort or blockhouse. Anyone who did not wholly agree with our every interpretation was regarded as a threat to our imagined solidarity. He was an object of suspicion to be isolated and not allowed to speak in our tribal councils.
As a group, I suspect we were anti- intellectual. This is characteristic of movements which had their roots in the rural life of that day. I doubt that we could have escaped being so. It was a natural thing, given the factors which helped to produce us. We were in doubt of preachers from "big city churches" and agreeably surprised when one of them proved to be "as common as an old shoe." Too, we were reluctant to read anything which was not written by one of "our brethren" and that narrowed the field of our reading greatly. The "loyal brethren" did not
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All of us took the brotherhood paper, another term for our official party organ. The editor was our factional watchdog, barking when he saw danger approaching, and sometimes growling when he did not, to let us know he was still on the job. Anyone who threatened his control could be slapped down with a well-directed journalistic blow. If the challenger was not popular he had to "fold his tent like the Arabs and as silently steal away." If he was a well-known preacher, his fans rallied to his defense and another faction resulted. The recognized journal exhibited the power of negative thinking.
I would not want you to think the various groups were composed of wicked people. On the contrary, they were good neighbors, willingly helpful in any kind of tragedy or emergency. It was only when they were inside their religious structures that they became like the Pharisees. In the marketplace they were kind and polite, deeply considerate and compassionate. It was only when they hung up their hats in the meetinghouse that the milk of human kindness clabbered and their disposition soured. I have often wondered what there is about a "consecrated pile of brick and stones" which stifles human concern and turns frequenters of "the sacred premises" into such stern and implacable judges. Preachers who are warm and outgoing when eating in a "Burger Chef" palace, turn as cold as an iceberg when inside of their holy place.
I have reached the conclusion that the building is a symbol. It constitutes the temple of the illiberal sect. It is a fortress which must be defended at all cost. As always, the priests are the front men, the guardians of orthodoxy, the gladiators of gracelessness. Without a designated priesthood, we relied upon preachers and elders to repulse invaders and we came to regard their aloofness, braggadocio and downright boorishness as indicative of faith and courage. In truth, they were indicators of a deep sense of fear and insecurity. To question the validity of the concepts which gave the faction its being was to threaten the position of self-appointed guardians of the ramparts, and the brethren react as all practitioners of pride react when their power is challenged. Outside the bailiwick men can act rationally. Inside of it they are caught up with all the emotional tides which flood their souls as they look at the pews. They must act like Peter with his finger in the dike, like Horatius at the bridge, or Leonidas at Thermopylae.
The party spirit inevitably freezes ignorance at a certain level. All creeds, written or unwritten, are actually shackles put on the mental powers to make possible control by others. Creeds which are not enforced are useless as factional manipulative tools, so every faction must have an enforcement squad, a contingent of partisan Minutemen, ready to ride hard at a moment's notice and "head them off at the pass." In Churches of Christ these were never selected by a college of cardinals or a convention of delegates. They were achieved by dynamic personalities, always fluent, sometimes flamboyant, and were perpetuated by "Godfathers" who passed on control to fawning sycophants upon whom they had put the finger for future control.
Sometimes the governing power rested in the editorship of the paper, and family dynasties kept themselves in power by the simple expedient of inheriting the official mouthpiece and owning the linotype machine. The editor defined the boundaries beyond which the thought-process must not penetrate, so original thinking was stifled, and questioning of the partisan position was taboo, resulting in banishment or exile for the careless and thoughtless soul who indulged in it. Each little faction was under its own incipient pope, surrounded by a palace guard whose members could be summoned to cut down any intruder, with trained replacements for the elite corps being regularly turned out by "the loyal schools."
This worked well and functioned
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It is axiomatic that every faction always skims the brains off the top while leaving the unstudious and unthinking mass undisturbed. It is only the thinkers who are driven off or thrown out. Conformists who never question, continue to huddle together, proudly congratulating each other upon their fidelity to the party and glorying in the fact that they have not changed in twenty years. A century ago such parties could survive. They were attuned to the life of the world from which they drew their constituents. The man who had a college degree was looked at askance. Now that world is gone! It will never return. We are living in an intellectual, sophisticated and technological era. It is this world we must reach or utterly fail in our mission for the Master.
Many of the brethren do not realize it, and many will resent my saying it, but from the very moment the first man stepped out of a space capsule, to leave his footsteps on the gray ash of the moon, any purported relevance of our narrow factional approach to relationship with the infinite Creator of the universe was wiped out. It was as if a giant hand had reached down with a wet sponge and swiped off the blackboard of religious history all that we had ever written in our partisan contentions.
As I sat in our living-room on that fateful Sunday night and watched a human being walk on the surface of one of the planets in the second heaven, I suddenly recognized that my whole life purpose had been altered. The struggle for men's minds in the computer age had been elevated to a higher plane. The battle had entered a new phase. It had been transferred to another field. Never again would debates over such trivia as classes in the congregation, multiple cups in the Lord's Supper, or the method of support of radio and television programs have any relationship to the world in which we live. All these disputes about methods, means and mechanics belonged to the old world of spiritual intrigue and partisan political maneuvering. Suddenly we were in a new world and time was running out. No longer can we engage in the luxury of exalting opinions or fending over fantasies. Once again it is either Christ or chaos. We dare not continue to contribute to the chaos!
I know what my brethren say when someone writes thus. I know because I once said the same things. I stood where they stand now. Those who are accustomed to judging allegiance to the Lord of life by one's stand on "the controversial issues" always conclude that one cannot be true to Christ until he lines up with the party. I disagree! One cannot be true to Christ who does line up with the party! The party chalkline is not the spiritual lifeline. I no longer represent any faction, fraction, sect or segment. I belong only to Jesus. I have no other Lord. I never intend again, so help me God, to allow anyone to lord it over my faith. The issues which divide us are controversial only because it is easier for carnal men to fight their brethren than to love them. They are no longer controversial to me because the Holy Spirit has made it easier for me to love my brethren than to fight them. But it took the Spirit to do it!
I know we have to be practical. Just
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After the project to unite the Christians had been inaugurated by erudite Presbyterians, and became a movement, the forces of history which helped to produce the Civil War, also divided it, and because of the nature of the developing philosophy it tended to center a great deal of its strength in the South. It is a little naive to brag that this was the only religious movement which did not divide over slavery, when the truth is that the brethren were already so busy tomahawking one another that a little matter such as the buying and selling of human beings like cattle did not mean too much.
We were divided by the passions which produced the struggle between the Blue and the Gray. As the King James Version so quaintly puts it, "my hap was to light" in one of the northern parties. We always felt spiritual hostility toward the brethren below the Mason and Dixon's line, and they returned the feeling with true Southern fervor. When I went to Arkansas to hold a series of studies I was attacked before I arrived by radio, newspaper and letters. Firm Foundation carried a desperate warning under the heading, "Ketcherside Invades the South." The brethren declared a temporary moratorium on their own heated squabbles to rally together to plug up the hole through which I was able to infiltrate. It was humorous to me at the time. It is even more so now that the brethren have resumed their squabbles where they left off.
Insofar as the non-instrument shard of the shattered vessel is concerned, it became primarily a white, rural, middle-class Southern-flavored institution. Congregations of blacks were segregated. In some places when Marshal Keeble held a "gospel meeting" the huge tent had a rope stretched down the center aisle. Whites sat on one side and blacks on the other. When people "came forward" at the invitation, a white preacher received the whites, while Brother Keeble received the blacks. Of course there was a lot of second-class sham about the whole thing on the part of both groups. But Brother Keeble had to constantly teach the "boy preachers" he took with him from his institute, to learn the Bible, and what was just as important "to stay in their place." So that you will not forget let me remind you that until recent years The Gospel Advocate had a special little section on next to the last page for reporting the news of "Colored Churches." And Where The Saints Meet, which is published by Firm Foundation, under the supervision of Brother Reuel Lemmons, has the notation "(col.)" after congregations of black saints. If you don't believe it glance your eye down the list of Texas congregations in the 1972 edition. The term "Nigger Heaven" did not originate with the theater but first designated the rear pews in church buildings where "the colored folks" sat when they drummed up enough nerve or interest to attend.
When I left the Lutheran communion
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A lot of our brethren will drag along, attacking forts long since abandoned and jousting with windmills which they mistake for giants. They will confuse walking in the old paths with wallowing in the old ruts. But this too shall pass away! The clouds of darkness will be wafted away by the fresh winds of deeper faith. Dogmatism will surrender to mutual sharing, and fears will be supplanted by association across our silly artificial barriers. It will not be accomplished in a day, but it will be accomplished! Slowly but surely we are being driven by the Spirit into the reality of our day, and we can praise God.
Primarily because of lack of qualified material I was thrust into a role of partisan leadership. I became a recognized champion, a debater and defender of our factional interpretations, deductions and opinions. I would not have you think this was against my will. I liked it. Gladiatorial combat was "right down my alley." I firmly believed that our group was the kingdom of heaven upon earth to the exclusion of all others. We were the people of whom Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel had spoken. The disciples of Tolbert Fanning, David Lipscomb and James A. Harding were enemies of the cross. R. H. Boll was so far out he wasn't even in it. I felt this way before I ever read a thing that either of them wrote. In fact I felt that way a lot more than I did after I read what they said. We could always select from their writings the little nuggets in which they agreed with us and use them to show that even the worst of men are sometimes right on some things.
It was great to know that you were in the congregation which had restored "the new testament faith and practice" without addition, subtraction, or modification. You were with the only people on earth who really spoke where the Bible spoke and remained silent where it was silent. It was thrilling to realize that if Paul came back and could locate us, which would take some doing, he would worship with us in a sense of deep contentment that things had not changed one iota since he wrote to the Thessalonians. We were willing victims of what a genial Texas editor calls "pattern theology." We had restored the pattern. No one else had. If you were not with us you were not with the pattern.
All we had to do was to continue as we were, holding a fall meeting after the crops were gathered in and baptizing the children that had "attained the age of accountability," and some day Jesus would come and separate us from the goats down South and say, "Come ye blessed of my Father!" We could watch the surprised look on the face of the "Bollites" as we politely referred to the brethren who were premillennial, as we marched by them on the way into the pearly gates. So we sang with gusto, "We've a home prepared for the saints above, just over in the gloryland," and if there were any strangers present we sang "There's an eye watching you!" There were a lot of eyes watching them. We knew who the saints were that were going home to be with Jesus. They were the ones who had individual cups and classes and opposed colleges and kitchens in the basement of the meetinghouses. The saints were those who were always on the right side of the wrong things!
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In their proper context these passages made real sense. They came alive. They were beautiful, appropriate, pertinent and correlative. Romans 16:17, 18! 2 John 9, 10! Amos 3:3! 1 Corinthians 1:10, 11! Finally I saw why I had wrested these from their context. I needed them as prooftexts, and what I was trying to prove was not in the text. It was a presumption. I was wrong about the divine concept of fellowship. For five long years I studied the divine ideal as revealed in the scriptures before I ever wrote a word on the subject of fellowship. Then I sat down and wrote the book Thoughts on Fellowship, followed a few years later by the volume called The Twisted Scriptures.
I was driven to the conclusion that the fellowship could never be confined to the members of a single faction, and that I was in the fellowship with those in every faction who had been born of the water and of the Spirit. At first, as I began to wade carefully out of the shallows in which I had always paddled around, I think I secretly hoped that I would find fellowship confined to the non-instrument wing growing out of the aspirations of our mostly Presbyterian forefathers. It is easier to receive those whom you have always regarded as "brothers in error" than those whom you have arrogantly branded as sectarians. Most of us choke to death on our nomenclature.
But God did not let me stop and settle down on my own sectarian lees. He kept pushing me further until, driven by the Word, I had to realize that the body of Christ is greater and more majestic than any movement within it. And that includes the restoration movement! Now I know that wherever my Father has a child I have a brother or sister. He has many children who never heard of Thomas and Alexander Campbell. He has children who are wholly ignorant of our historical restoration movement. The one body contains every saved person on this earth. I am in that body with everyone of them. One in Christ! What a mind-blowing, heart-throbbing, breath-taking, soul-purging thought!
We are not one because we have catechized, analyzed and synthesized every truth. None of us know it all! All of us have much yet to learn. We will always be disciples, and none of us will graduate while in the flesh. We are united, not because of what we know, but because of whom we know. It is not being on the Dean's List but being in Jesus that counts. Some who are in Christ are quite ignorant but they are one with those who are educated, not because of what they have in their minds but because of Him whom they have enshrined in their hearts.
I would like to share with you again some of the things I have learned about fellowship. It is these things which have altered my life. Our word fellowship is a translation of the Greek koinonia. So rich in meaning is the Greek word that fellowship is inadequate to express the deep content of the original. It is further hampered by the restraints and restrictions imposed upon it by well-intentioned but misguided partisans. No single English word is expansive enough or full enough to exhaust the meaning of koinonia. In the revised version commissioned by King James and authorized to be read in Anglican churches the term is variously rendered. It is translated communication 1, communion 4, contribu-
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The root is the word for common, and koinos is so rendered seven times. The suffix "ship" is added to nouns in such a manner as to form another noun to signify a state or condition in which a joint interest is sustained by persons. Occasionally I get letters asking such questions as "Do you fellowship instrumental music?" or "Do you fellowship Sunday schools?" With all due respect for my querists I must say that they reveal an ignorance of the nature of fellowship, which may be more tragic than the matters about which they write. Fellowship is a relation sustained with other persons and not with things, as the word "fellow" indicates.
"Fellow" is from the Old Norse felagi, comrade. No one writes to me asking "Do you comradeship Ford cars?" I have never had a letter asking, "Do you friendship huckleberry pies?" But that would be just as appropriate as to ask "Do you fellowship kitchens in the church basement?" When someone writes me like that, I know he needs to do a lot of studying first before he begins to set himself up as an authority on fellowship.
Fellowship in Christ is not related to instrumental music. It is not related to Sunday schools. It is not related to such items as have kicked up a storm or created controversy among the brethren. Those in the fellowship may, and undoubtedly will have varied views about them and scores of other matters. But such views will not affect the fellowship unless some make their views a Savior instead of Christ, and make union with the party more important than unity with our precious Lord.
Others make the same kind of error when they ask "Do you fellowship persons who use instrumental music?" No one ever asks, "Do you companionship your wife?" or "Do you partnership your associates?" Fellowship in Christ is a state or condition or quality of being in which you receive, acknowledge and recognize as brothers and sisters all others who are in Him. Of course I am in that state with some who use instruments in conjunction with their expression of public praise, and with a lot of others who do not. I am not in the fellowship with them because they use instruments, or because they do not. I am in the fellowship with them because they are in Christ. Fellowship based on any other consideration is too niggling, piddling or insignificant to concern me.
The fellowship about which I write is a state created by God and into which he calls us. This is what the Bible reveals and I believe it. "God is faithful, by whom ye were called into the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord." Every person who has heard the call and responded to it is in the fellowship. Every person who is in our Lord Jesus is in the fellowship. We are called by the gospel, "Whereunto he called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ." It is plain that every person who properly responds to the gospel, answers the call, and is in the fellowship.
The response to the good news is belief of the greatest fact ever announced to sinful men, that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah and the Son of God, and immersion in water in validation of that faith. Every sincere believer on the face of this earth who is immersed because he believes that one great and magnificent proposition is in the fellowship, and I am in it with him.
Fellowship is created by the gospel, the call of God! It has nothing to do with whether I am circumcised or uncircumcised. It has nothing to do with whether I am a conscientious vegetarian or can freely eat all things. It has nothing to do with whether I esteem one day above another or esteem every day alike. It has nothing to do with whether I think Christ is coming before the millennium or the millennium is coming before Christ. It has nothing to do with what I think about the method of supporting the Herald of Truth program. Fellowship in the Lord Jesus Christ is
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Fellowship has not one thing to do with whether a person is in one or the other of the two-dozen parties of the non-instrument Church of Christ, or the Christian Church, or in any other historical development, but with whether he is in the Lord Jesus Christ. There is only one church. It is the body of Christ. Every saved person on this earth is in it. All of the arguments and debates about this faction or that faction, this paper or that paper, this issue or that issue, are useless insofar as fellowship is concerned. Fellowship is a creation of the blessed Holy Spirit. Every person on this earth in whom the Spirit dwells is in the fellowship, even if he never heard of the "issues" which have become factional and sectarian "geiger counters." Fellowship results from the Holy Spirit. Factionalism results from the party spirit.
Since those who are in the fellowship will never see everything alike while in the flesh and caught up in the human predicament, there will always be areas of disagreement and matters in which not all can jointly participate. No one must be forced into doing that which his conscience cannot condone, but the mere fact that one cannot participate in some things does not argue that he should not participate in anything. The conscience which will not allow me to share in thoughts and actions related to time must never destroy the fellowship in the timeless. In the physical family, if my brother smokes cigarettes of which I cannot approve and in which I will not indulge, this does not mean that I cannot help him paint the house, put up the storm sash or sit down together at the Thanksgiving table in our father's home. It would be absurd to conclude that because we painted the house together I thereby endorsed his habit of smoking.
In the spiritual family the one whose conscience did not allow him to eat meat, certainly could not do so with the brother who did, but they were still brethren, although he had to decline participation with the other in those features of which he could not partake. He dare not judge him! Each man has to be fully persuaded in his own mind. Each will give an account of himself to God. He is not accountable to or for his brethren. He should not play God with their lives nor allow them to do so with his. The word of God clearly teaches that men can do to the Lord what they cannot do together (Romans 14:6).
For years we made the tragic mistake of equating fellowship with another with endorsement of his opinions, views and doctrinal interpretations. We wrongly concluded that if we sanctioned what he did that was right this automatically made us endorse what he thought that was wrong. This is an absurd and childish position. Certainly it is right to pray to God but if a man from another faction attended one of our meetings we did not dare to call upon him to pray for fear that by this gesture of brotherly recognition we would be openly condoning his dissenting views. This made for a good deal of sham and hypocrisy. It promoted arrogance and rudeness of almost unbelievable quality among those who professed to be followers of Jesus.
Certainly Paul did not endorse the actions of Peter at Antioch. He said he opposed him to his face because he was clearly in the wrong. Did he disavow being in the fellowship with him? If so, the foundation of the apostles and prophets had a big crack in it and was hardly suitable as an underpinning for the temple of God. The brethren at Jerusalem did not agree with "some of the Pharisaic party who had become believers" (Acts 15:5), but they did not deny the validity of their faith nor refuse permission for them to speak in the assembly.
Paul did not agree with the Corinthians about many things but he did not think of them as being outside the fellowship. He said they were "God's people at Corinth, dedicated to him in Christ Jesus, claimed by him as his own." He called them brothers. He said they were God's garden and God's building. He said,
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It was the attitude of Paul toward the congregation at Corinth which had such a profound effect in changing my own attitude toward the congregations I knew. If one could sigh for and long to visit and labor with a group like the Corinthian congregation with all of its faults, frailties and fallacies, surely I should not wash out on the brethren I knew. The letters to the Corinthians stand as a monumental rebuke to the foolish idea that fellowship implies endorsement. What a chance Paul would have had to attack these brethren, to refuse to visit them, and to warn others against doing so. Instead, he wrote, "Our whole aim, my own dear people, is to build you up."
I have never known a congregation with even one-third of the problems of the saints at Corinth. The worst congregations I have ever seen in my life could not even compare with Corinth. Yet Paul wrote, "Here I am preparing to pay you a third visit...I will gladly spend what I have for you--yes, and spend myself to the limit." When I think of my own cold, callous and contemptible feeling in the past toward brethren who differed with me I could weep bitterly over my littleness and bigotry. Never once did Paul question that he was in the fellowship with the ripped-off saints at Corinth. Not once did he suggest dividing them. Not once did he intimate that some of them should split off and start a "loyal church."
As long as the letters to the Corinthians remain in the sacred scriptures they will act as a sharp slap across the faces of those who have created a faction of separated brethren over such matters as the method of financing radio and television programs intended to inform our pagan culture that Jesus has come. Let me be plain with you! If brethren in the Lord in Abilene, Texas, want to receive funds for financing a program which they have designated Herald of Truth, whether I agree with their project or not, they are my brothers, and I am in the fellowship with them. If brethren in Florida oppose financing the program, whether I agree with their position or not, they are my brothers, and I am in the fellowship with them.
But get this! I am unequivocally opposed to the division and fragmentation of the believers over such an inane question. I am opposed to pumping hot air into this issue until it balloons out of all proportion and negates the relationship created by the shed blood of God's dear Son. I refuse to believe that any opinion held by the saints of God in Abilene or Lufkin in this century is as important as what happened at Golgotha in the first century. To elevate every dissident notion of men to equal importance with all that God has revealed is to make nothing important, and will make the cross of Christ of none effect in the minds of men.
To make tithes of mint and anise and cummin have the same value as justice, mercy and faith, is not to increase the value of the mint and anise, but to devaluate justice, mercy and faith. Every one of our tragic parties is a living proof of our distorted sense of values. Not one is an indication that we approach divinity, but they all exist as open monuments to the worst features of our fallen humanity. "Can you not see that while there is jealousy and strife among you, you are living on the purely human level of your lower nature?" (1 Corinthians 3:3). Do not forget that this was addressed to a congregation which should have divided into a dozen groups on the basis of our contemporary factional rationalization! How many different "Churches of Christ" do you think would have been in Corinth if the people had possessed the same distorted and warped views which have plagued the heirs of the restoration movement?
Fellowship in Christ Jesus does not
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At one time in my life I was brainwashed into thinking that fellowship in Christ Jesus was contingent upon everyone arriving at a certain degree of knowledge at the same time. The degree was always determined by our own factional attainment. The party "somewhats" determined what constituted matters of faith, matters of opinion and matters of indifference. They sorted out "the musts" from "the maybes." If you agreed with them on the sorting arrangement you were "in" but if you did not you were "out." You did not really need to worry about thinking. That was done for you. Fellowship with us was a package deal. You had to take the rotten apples with the good.
Of course, the truth is that no two people on earth reach the same degree of knowledge at the same time. To predicate fellowship on such a far-out, farcical and fantastic notion makes fellowship impossible. You cannot freeze the level of knowledge. What you do is merely establish a plateau of ignorance. If someone comes into the faction and does not stop thinking, he will attain a higher degree of knowledge, and when he does he will be thrown out. This does not hurt him. It merely frees him to go on thinking. But it hurts the party by making it more ingrown, moronic and imbecilic.
All knowledge is built upon association, environment, research and mental ability. That ability involves retentiveness and rationalization. No two persons on earth have had identical experiences. No two have the same mental capacities. Our mental faculties are as diverse as our facial features. We can no more all think alike than we can look alike. We are not going to heaven in a clump. We are strung out along the road. Some of us are pretty far back. That doesn't bother me. If you are on the right road and facing in the right direction I praise God! I trust you'll not be looking back over your shoulder to see if the others are keeping up. If you are you are looking in the wrong direction. You might run into one of God's telephone poles and knock yourself out cold.
Uniformity of knowledge can never be the basis of fellowship. There are three reasons this is so. All of them are set forth in 1 Corinthians 8, where we are informed that it is love and not knowledge which builds up, and brings recognition from God. First, all human knowledge is relative. "If anyone fancies that he knows, he knows nothing yet, in the true sense of knowing" (verse 2). Second, knowledge is not universal. "But not everyone knows this" (verse 7). Third, all knowledge is affected by our past association and attainment. "There are some in whom the consciousness of the false god is so persistent, that even now they eat this food with a sense of its heathen consecration." Anyone who is brash enough to state that he knows that point of knowledge which all in Christ must attain to remain in the fellowship of God and Christ proves that he knows nothing yet as he ought to know.
I must say, in closing, that I think the matter of gravest concern among us is not the division and the fragmentation which has occurred. It is rather the atti-
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