To-day is a memorial. It is a prophecy also. It is Ebenezer. It may be Pisgah, the vision of future conquest, and Olivet, the sense of divinely imposed obligation to master the world, both in one. We might, alas! convert it into Kadesh-Barnea--which is but another name for rejected opportunity--for delayed achievement.

      How, then, let us ask, ought we to be [440] affected by these reports of what under the blessing of God we have planned and done?

      To what conclusions ought this day to conduct us?

      Certainly we ought to be profoundly convinced that the enterprise of consolidating the church is feasible. Those who have identified themselves with the churches of the Restoration are a great host, sufficient to populate three such cities as this in which we are now gathered. Nor did the greater part of these idly and unquestioningly inherit this conviction, but came to it with care and pains, sometimes through fierce battles with prosperous and respectable prejudice and seductive self-interest.

      I think I hear them without there now--this mighty army of our people--cry to us--cry to the heavy soul of the "iron city"--cry to a divided church waiting perplexed, but thrilling with the motions of a newly conceived hope--cry to the deeply, though unconsciously, interested world--and say, "The work is great--divinely great--but it can be done."

      And there are those who, though they belong not to our churches, nevertheless share our faith that peace and partnership may yet bind in one all the people of Christ. On every hand of late voices of leading and of power are heard, pleading from the platforms of parties the cause of catholicity. And every year interdenominational assemblies are more frequent, more representative, more influential, and more and more in the midst of these is seen the vision of "one like unto the Son of man," who lifts his hands in prayer that "they all may be one." Nor is there wanting the testimony of actual co-operation to the feasibility of Christian union. But a surer witness than any of these that, in our quest of union among Christians, we do not follow a mirage in the desert of partisan strife, but the gleam of heaven, is in our own breasts. For which of us who have once espoused the cause of a reunited church has not thereafter felt a vast forbearance, an importunate and imperative brotherliness toward every follower of Jesus, a brotherliness which, uttering itself in words and attitude alike, has called aloud to every Christian of every sort, "You are my brother, my sister. You may not allow, the claim. You may even misunderstand my spirit and purpose in making it, but you are my brother, my sister, I tell you. You shall not--you can not--raise efficient defences against my love"? Having felt thus the spell of the grand ideal over our own souls, we can not doubt its power to subdue others, its ultimate triumph throughout the church. But our most solid ground of hope in this enterprise is the fact that Jesus prayed for it. Him the Father can not but hear and heed. So our fathers trusted long ago, and so we trust to-day.

      Another conviction which this day should root in us as the oak of a

H. D. SMITH.

thousand years is rooted in its native earth, is that this enterprise of unifying Christians is necessary. By reason of denominationalism there is an endless, useless, senseless reduplication of the apparatus of administration in missions, frightfully costly in both money and men. By reason of denominationalism the village and country church is often a feeble, flaccid, dying thing--two to ten churches where there should be but one. By reason of denominationalism, which sunders the church into fragments which are often contemptibly ineffectual, the skeptic grows supercilious, the infidel blatant, the thoughtless torpid in the presence of the gospel. Thus again the problem of paganism at home is largely denominationalism. By reason of denominationalism the honest seeker after divine truth, both at home and abroad, is bewildered, knowing not to whom to turn for requisite teaching. By reason of denominationalism giant evils, social, political, moral, strut Goliath-like in boastful and brutal challenge--evils that long since had cowered and slunk away like whipped dogs to their kennels at the mere sight of a united church. It is [441] the repeatedly expressed conviction of the more thoughtful of all parties that there must be, and that soon, a more real, more tangible, more visible unity among Christians.

      As to apologies for division they grow daily less frequent, less sincere, less credible; and those who make them proclaim thereby their own unfitness for leadership, their own inability to keep step with the mighty marching music of God.

      We should feel upon us the urgency of a vast and practical necessity as we plead the cause of Christian union. We should press it home to all hearts as the indispensable prerequisite of the rule of Christ over our race. Let us then pray for it, plan for it, talk for it, argue for it, work for it, live for it--as our fathers did. Let us do all in the love which is the bond of perfectness, taking care that we never hereafter plead for union in the jealous and hateful spirit of division.

      If we have stood for the universal communion of saints, we have stood for the widest spiritual liberty also. Our plea on this account arose most naturally. Our fathers were not long in discovering that the force which drove and kept Christians apart was the tyranny of unauthorized standards of doctrine and polity. And so they found that in order to be one they must be free.

      Each of us has thought his own thought, spoken his own word, lived his own life, regarding no human standard, answering to no human authority. And we are free to-day, more widely and deeply free than Christians of any time since that of the apostles. We have, indeed, those who are called representative men. But to what extent do they represent us? Just to the extent that they teach us or that we teach them, or that they and we mutually instruct each other. They hold in their hands no scepter except if, be that of truth, there is no halo of authority upon their brows except it be that of truth. We are bound to follow them only as far as we shall see for ourselves that they follow truth. And each soul of us must judge for himself what is truth. Those of the past not only brought us from under the yoke of other men's opinions, but, most of all, they resolutely refused to bind us with their own opinions. They bequeathed to us a precious legacy of truth, and along with it the spirit of the pioneer, their own spirit of heroic daring, which travels guided by the stars.

      Coincidently with the discovery of our fathers that we must be free in order to be one, it was clearly seen that in order to be free from human tyranny it was necessary to submit to divine government. The rule of the tyrant would last until the sway of the rightful sovereign should begin. Therefore our fathers stood for loyalty also--loyalty to Christ. Each one of them said, "Let no man trouble me," and in the same breath, "I am the bondservant of Jesus Christ." They called no man master, but they remembered with tender and Scriptural devotion that one was their Master even Christ. Their liberty was not license. It was true liberty, and had its law therefore. That law was the will of Christ. What would Jesus have them do? That was their first and last question. When they had heard Jesus speak, either in his own person or by his apostles, controversy was at an end.

      How has this propaganda of loyalty to Christ prospered among us? Are we still loyal to him?

      Perhaps we shall most quickly arrive at satisfactory answers to these questions by raising another. Let us ask, then, What is the true test of loyalty to Christ? The Scriptures are clear upon this point. They require (1) confession of him as Messiah and the Son of God; (2) baptism into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; (3) stated and frequent meetings with the disciples to celebrate the Lord's Supper and for mutual instruction and exhortation; (4) a certain simple polity or government for the church; (5) a holy life, the standard of which is Jesus himself.

      The good confession, as of old, stands the stalwart guardian of every church door. Nor have we emasculated the mighty words of the divine symbol. The confession, thus constantly and ingenuously used, keeps alike from Unitarianism, which sinks the deity of our Lord in his humanity, and from those orthodox speculations concerning him which [442] perplex the intellect without deepening devotion or enlarging service.

      We have held fast and stand to-day upon primitive ground in respect of baptism. That the beautiful ordinance looks in some real way forward to the remission of sins; that it is for penitent believers in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and for such alone; that its form is immersion and its element water is held by us with practical unanimity. Whatever disposition has been in any of us hitherto to abate something from these views, especially in the matter of the form of the ordinance, lest they should hinder us in our work of pacification, has departed. This disposition has gone, first, because we have felt that we must obey God rather than men, though the temptation to do otherwise should wear the radiant form of Christian union itself. It has gone, for the second reason, that ampler experience has shown us in this particular what we always saw to be true in general, that the really catholic is the primitive.

      We still set the table of the Lord in the midst of our public worship; we still say to those who may be gathered about it with us, "Let every man examine himself, and so let him eat." The ideal of the weekly observance of the holy feast is realize in the most of our churches.

      As to the teaching had in these assemblies of our people, whether preaching or less formal instruction, it aims first of all at being true to the mind of Christ. To this end it keeps close, as a rule, to the great Book. As a result, it is simple, popular, practical. It makes much of religion. It cares little for theology. It is evangelistic, it has its eye upon the world. The genius of conquest is in its breast. It would get things done. It would destroy the traffic in intoxicating drinks; it would abolish the oppressions of corporate greed; it would show organized labor the folly of violence and the wisdom of obedience to the law; it would shame vice, rebuke worldliness, uproot heathenism, promote domestic religion, build the Christian school and the church. It would pull down sin and set Christ upon the throne of the world to rule now and everywhere in its daily life.

      It is safe to say that our own doctrinal loyalty was never before so great as now. The Bible was never taught among us more generally, more intelligently, more enthusiastically. Our churches were never before so filled with the resounding call to work. The name of Christ never before so permeated our sermons, our class exercises, our hymns, our periodicals, our books.

      Never before have we preached the atonement with so profound conviction that without the shedding of blood there is no remission. Never before have we proclaimed with more exuberant confidence the resurrection of our Lord and the hope grounded thereon of the general resurrection and of the life everlasting.

      As to government, that simple, flexible polity which the original study of our fathers discovered to have been approved by the apostles, we have adhered to without addition or abatement, not because our fathers approved it, but simply because a like original study of the same matter has brought us to the same conclusions concerning it.

      We have treated heresies and all ministerial irregularities quite as promptly and efficiently as our brethren of the most compactly connectional churches, and, in respect of the aftermath of division and strife among leaders and churches in such cases, far more successfully.

      The seriously offending preacher among us has simply dropped from his place for lack of employment, and the churches and preachers in general have not been troubled with a trial that arrayed them in contending ranks from end to end of the land.

      We ought, however, frankly to admit that in some respects we are at temporary disadvantage in our polity. You anticipate me. You are aware that the very extent and thoroughness of our congregational and individual independency hinders for the time being those great general enterprises which require extensive co-operation--such as national and foreign missions, schools, colleges and large charities.

      Our disadvantage is that which inheres in democracy everywhere. Democracy can not be better than the average citizen, therefore it is that the citizen of the free country must be taught. The safety and progress of his [443] nation demand it. Better government waits for a better citizen. What our case requires, then, is not a change of polity, but education in missions and benevolence, in all wide sympathies and activities, in the divine way of love applied to the need of the race.

      Let us now apply to ourselves the final test. How do we live? Are we good husbands and wives, keeping our marriage vows in their spirit as well as in their letter? Are we wise and loving parents, leading our children to esteem even the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of a Rockefeller or a Harriman? Are we good guides of youth in general, encouraging the best and strongest of our sons and daughters to give themselves to the great special ministries of the church? Do we reverence age? Withal, have we the spirit of service which sanctifies itself for the sake of others, and not for the pharisaical satisfaction of feeling itself better than others? Do we understand that all unity, all liberty and all loyalty, in order to be Christlike, must look with passionate eagerness to the healing of the hurt of sin in every human heart?

      Our corporate activities and private lives will bear comparison with those of our fathers. Not less will they bear comparison with those of our religious neighbors, all their and our respective circumstances being taken into the account.

      But let us not mistake our situation. The life of Christ which we are pledged to pursue rises a vast height before us still. We have need of patience, skill, industry, watchfulness, high purpose; in a word, of the mighty upholding and impelling spirit of God.

      We turn now to the new time. Let us greet it with the temper of those who are too humble for ecstasy, too faithful for discouragement, seeking the old paths still, and, whenever we shall have found them, walking in them. Then, after another century, they shall speak of us and our labors, as the first historian of the church wrote of the Evangel in the apostolic time: "So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed."

      When Alexander Campbell founded his second great periodical, he named it the Millennial Harbinger, and we are persuaded that he was essentially right. For even generations are but minutes upon the dial by which God works. The night of division in the church is far spent. The day of her unity and conquest is at hand. All the airs of our time are laden with songs that promise the morning.

[CCR 440-444]