SERMONS IN CONVENTION HALLS, pp. 497-522.
• "Liberty--Union--Charity" by W. E. Crabtree, pp. 497-500.
• "The Old Book Stands" by M. M. Davis, pp. 500-504.
• "Not with Observation" by Burris A. Jenkins, pp. 504-506.
• "The Supreme Question" by H. O. Breeden, pp. 506-509.
• "Christian Union and the Disciples of Christ" by S. M. Martin, pp. 510-512.
• "Christian Unity" by James M. Philputt, pp. 513-517.
• "The Renaissance of the Apostolic Church" by I. N. McCash, pp. 517-522.

      I. We have sniffed the air of freedom, and should die in any other. We will never turn back. It is "freeman stand or freeman fa'" with us henceforth. We insist that "each of us shall give account of himself unto God." "I would ask one man, 'Why do you judge your brother?' and I would ask the other, 'Why do you despise your brother?' For we shall all stand before the bar of God." Religiously, in more senses than one, we have turned every one to his own way. It is a delightful thing that we may turn every one to his own way, acknowledging no human overlord in conscience and life. Solid sameness, so tame and tiresome anywhere, is hideous and intolerable in faith. We have not overemphasized individuality. It is the only real life. These unhampered, unrestrained men are the worthwhiles, with red blood of purpose in their hearts and the courage of truth in their souls. Especially here in America we have breathed the ozone of mental, moral and spiritual freedom, and the church that shall in this place make the effective appeal must not defy this hard fact. Better than an American church in origin is an American church in its spirit of freedom, that jealously insists upon liberty in opinions. "The least governed people is the best governed."

      Religious despotism and the dictatorship of the preferred and privileged few have shallow root, and intolerance and repression pine in this soil of the freeborn. The expansion of the West will do its perfect work. All will be crying soon in the church, as they have elsewhere, "Room, more room!" It is true that the sense of this freedom has led to the hundred-gated denominationalism of this country. In the delirium of it, they have not heeded the Lord's

W. E. CRABTREE.

injunction to call no man master. They have plunged into the extremes of folly. No doctrine is too preposterous, nor rite too exacting or ludicrous, to deter devotees. New-made Americans will take sides on any proposed principle, policy or plan. Country of church complexity. They have come from the East and the West, from the North and the South, and have sat down with Puritan, Cavalier and Westerner in this kingdom of the free. They have brought their diverse conceptions and misconceptions, their temperaments and trainings, their prejudices and predilections. They have found the congenial church or founded it, and since, in this particular field, they feel a special right to protest, to do original work, to challenge and confuse, what we call denominationalism, streaked and striped, spotted and speckled, ringed, starred and blazed, has resulted.

      While this indomitable spirit of the [497] free is responsible for fine divisions in the body of Christ, it very soon turns its sword against its own offspring. Denominationalism means crystalization, it means hamper and restraint, it means channels too narrow, it means antiquation. Therefore, it means the partial mind, the restless and discouraged spirit. All the same sort of folk are not in a particular church. Did Paul address churches or a local congregation when he wrote: "I mean this, that each one of you saith, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ? For whereas there is among you jealousy and strife, are ye not carnal?" Speaking of my special beliefs and likes, deliver me from my friends, for my own good, and save me from those of like faith and order. I, most of all, require the brother of contrary opinion and order. Introduce me to the man with a new thought and shock me out of my rut with a new custom. We plead, not for rival churches with set opinions, but for one church possessed of many opinions. Ask them very few questions and give us all the classes. Give them the right hand, brethren, the dogmatist and the doubter, the logician and the mystic, the dreamer and the doer, the worshiper of God and the one who does not forget the poor, Mary and Martha, Philip and Simon Magus, Peter and James, Paul with his Silas, and Barnabas with his John Mark--the Lord is the maker of them all.

      Here is at once perceived the danger lurking in this religious individualism. Who is not aware of the extremes into which wild liberty may plunge us? We are reminded that the French goddess of liberty had uncombed and streaming hair and the torch in her hand was that of the incendiary. Somehow, our Lord, whose truth makes us free, expected that we should find a unitizing principle which would restrain us, reduce us to order and save us from ourselves. It was no time for light and formal praying. The Saviour, wrestling with the dark image of the crucifixion, must brush aside the unimportant when he said, "Holy Father, keep them in thy name which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are." "Not take them out of the world," so runs the petition, but to be "kept from the evil in the world, that they may be sanctified in the truth." Oh, friends, hear him: "Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on me through their word; that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be in us; that the world may believe that thou didst send me." We must never cease to lead our denominationalism, with its "bitter jarrings and janglings of party spirit, its uncertainty and clashing of human opinions, its rending and mangling of his mystical body into pieces," up to the light of this divine intercession. In the hearing of this unselfish death prayer, shall we be content to call our unnatural and woeful divisions in the church merely foolish and regrettable? Rather let us with a full heart believe and call them sinful and heinous. Shall we render them a passing sigh and a vain wish that they were not? Shall we not rather here dedicate ourselves to the enticing, though difficult, task of uniting into one great body the separate, wasteful and warring factions of the church of Christ?

      II. Where shall we find the way to unity? I know, without the shadow of a doubt, where our hope lies, where we shall not fail to achieve it. Coupled with the resolute defiance of human authority, oppressive and burdensome, is the deep respect felt for and shown the will and word of God. The authority of Christ in the department of religion is acknowledged by those that are near and those that are far off. It was to this profound reverence for the Bible and the Saviour it reveals, that our fathers so confidently and so successfully appealed. That "Declaration of Religious Independence," whose issuance we celebrate, contained for its opening words: "We are persuaded that it is high time for us, not only to think, but also to act for ourselves; to see with our own eyes and to take our measures directly and immediately from the divine standard. To this alone we feel ourselves divinely bound to be conformed." The ground of our hope for the ultimate oneness of believers in Christ has always resided, not in the silence of the Scriptures so much as in the silence of the people in the presence of the Scriptures, their unwillingness to maintain [498] the silence of veneration and tractableness when the Scriptures speak. We wait before the Scriptures as Israel waited before Sinai, till there come forth that greater Lawgiver and Leader, that prophet from among the people, yet crowned with heaven's effulgent diadem, our Lord Jesus Christ. He had said in the day of his humiliation, "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd." Now, behold him, exalted and given a name that is above every name, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow and that every tongue should confess him Lord. This Lord, this Shepherd and Bishop of souls, shall bring his other sheep and lead forth the flock, one and indivisible, forevermore.

      So long as he himself remains the ideal character and exemplar for the individual, so long will the church he founded remain in its essential qualities the ideal, beyond which congregations of most enlightened men may not hope to go, but toward which, and which only, they should be satisfied to approach. We are not disappointed in the exalted vision, the pristine strength and remarkable catholicity of that church of the New Testament, church of the few fundamentals, broad and deep, church of the widest range of personal choice and movement, church virile enough to attack and conquer a pagan world. We hold it up in its refreshing undenominational constitution and work.

      So, in its life and mission, that first church was all-inclusive, and in its testifying to the gospel of the grace of God, "there was neither Jew nor Greek, there was neither bond nor free, there was neither male nor female, for they were all one man in Christ Jesus." These are the few simple, yet basic, truths about the church Christ founded, and we have seen how in creed, name, ordinances and life it is too broad for a single denomination. Rather is it possible for every church to hold fast every great principle precious to it, to modify merely some incidentals so as to broaden for the wider brotherhood, and in every modification defer not to the wish of man, but to this ideal church God has shown us on the New Testament page.

      Christianity is Christ. Christendom may be great, but Christ is far greater, and our hope for that unity that shall convert the world is in him. He has been truly called "the living bond of unity necessary to fellowship among men and the worship of God."

      III. "And above all these put on love, which is the bond of perfectness."

      From the beginning, the motto "In opinions liberty, in faith unity, in all things charity," has been emphasized in the religious life of this great people. It must be frankly admitted that, for most of this century, we have dwelt upon the first and the middle phrases, those involving the mental problems of faith and opinion. The best we could show toward one who differed was a silent tolerance. To our shame, it must be admitted that our career has not always shown forth that magnanimity which characterizes Father Campbell, when, respecting the reception of Aylett Raines, the Universalist, into the church, he said: "He is philosophically a Restorationist and I am a Calvinist, but, notwithstanding this difference of opinion between us, I would put my right hand into the fire and have it burned off, before I would hold up my hands against him." I come to extol the last phrase of our motto; I come to claim that whatever of narrowness and intolerance may have shown itself in particular quarters, from time to time, there has been enough of sweet charity permeating the growing body to save us, to keep us consistently one. Thank God for those apostolic men of broad charity--raised up at critical points in our growth, to sound out, and so steadily, the doctrine of love, that unfailing grace that beareth, believeth, hopeth and endureth all things. The stupendous task of uniting Christendom is more than half effected, for that sun-disk on the eastern horizon unmistakably indicates that our day is the day of love, Christian love, church love. Do you read the meaning of this in change of sentiment and in change of attitude? It means the recognition in its real sense of Christ's "other sheep"; it means that we and they "are no longer strangers and sojourners, but fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God." No longer as we stand praying do we say, "That son of thine," as we [499] refer to the member of another communion, but we say "That brother of mine," and these days it is very far from a formal prayer. The whole spirit is changed. No one with the hardihood to apologize for our arbitrary and useless separateness, they are pointing out: the woeful waste in men and means, the whole areas of unreached and unreaped harvest, the dearth of spirituality and sympathy resulting from the haphazard, hit and miss method, duplicating and dispiriting as it is. The sentiment for real union is percolating downward, till many a village pulpit is echoing the plea of our great metropolitan prophets for the consolidation of God's army and its discipline under the one mighty Captain. What an inspiring sight that consummation, angels rejoicing, demons trembling!

      Love of brother is conquering, and we are passing out of darkness into light. I have saved the greatest proof for the last. I refer to the federation of all the churches inaugurated within four years, and whose last expression was the great Philadelphia Convention. Thomas Campbell issued the call for this federation a hundred years ago. It was more than the fear of the trackless wilderness that kept them from assembling in the western end of this State at that time. Hear his call: "Come, then, dear brethren, we most humbly beseech you, cause your light to shine upon our weak beginnings, that we may see to work by it. Evince your zeal for the glory of Christ and the spiritual welfare of your fellow-Christians by your hearty and zealous co-operation to promote the unity, purity, prosperity of his church." And we witness one year removed from the Centennial of his call in the eastern end of this State the delegated representatives of all the great churches met together to seek at least a working basis for unity. If it be true that the spirits of the departed hover near the resting-places of their tenements of clay, and if those spirits have the power to convey themselves to other points, do you doubt that one year ago there took place across this State a pilgrimage of choice spirits made perfect, to breathe the sweet incense of their benediction upon the federation of all the churches?

      As we come to be free in Christ we shall find ourselves all the more loyal to him. He is more than Lord commanding. He is the attraction drawing and holding us in one great company. If we love him, and as we increase in our love and apprehension of him, we shall be pained at his mystical body, the church, wounded and mangled by human spear-thrusts. We shall lead every thought captive to his obedience, we shall count the peace and prosperity of his kingdom too great a consideration to permit our whim or preference or special belief to mar or hinder. We shall return to take the pure draughts of the living water he supplies. He is our hope. He is our creed. His is our name. His is our command. His is our life. And as he becomes our all in all, his people shall become our people and all shall bring their glory into his city and walk in his light.

[CCR 497-500]