THE moral and spiritual purity of the visible Church is something that every true Christian should be deeply concerned about. Holiness becometh God’s house for ever, and without the purity which He requires in His Word, no religious body can warrantably expect to enjoy the divine blessing or true spiritual prosperity. Looking abroad, however, upon the professing Churches of to-day, we find that the greater number of them pay little regard to New Testament purity, but introduce anything into the service of God that pleases the popular taste. Thus it is that secular and carnal elements in Church work are painfully conspicuous. One of these elements is the social meeting with its secular entertainment—a fleshly device to make religion pleasant to the carnal mind. We believe that these social meetings, however innocent they may appear to many, are nothing short of plague spots in the life of any organisation calling itself a Church. They betray a worldly spirit wherever they flourish, and their existence tends to deepen and intensify the worldliness. Some of these gatherings are no doubt worse than others, but from the plain tea meeting to the elaborate soiree or concert, we believe they are all wrong, and ought to have no place in the spiritual work of the visible Church. It is our present purpose to endeavour to give some solid reasons for the belief that has been expressed.
1. Our first reason for thinking that these social meetings are wrong is that we have no warrant in God’s Word for them.
We are told that the early Christians did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, but this was done “from house to house”—not in their public assemblies for divine service. Christ fed the hungry multitude, and the early Church took steps to provide for the poor and the necessitous; but this is something quite different from bringing worldly entertainments into the house of God in order to enhance its attractiveness. “Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” As for secular and carnal songs at Church meetings, such things are as entirely alien to New Testament purity as darkness is to light and sin to holiness.
2. A second reason is that they violate the Scriptural idea of the Church as a spiritual institution.
The chief end for which the Church has been designed, with its various means of grace, is not to provide for the natural or common needs of men, but for their spiritual needs. Still less has it been appointed to gratify their sinful and carnal tastes. The Church is the place where God is to be worshipped with reverence and godly fear, and where “the bread of life” is to be dispensed to perishing souls. Men are under the deepest obligation to remember this in all their meetings in connection with the affairs of God’s house. To introduce secular entertainment into these meetings is to bring in a lowering element that is fitted to banish that spirituality and elevation of mind necessary for meditation on the highest things. “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”
The Apostle Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians deals with certain abuses of the Lord’s Supper that had taken place at Corinth, and not only reproveth the Corinthians for partaking of the Supper, as if it were a common meal, but gives them to understand that there is a clear line of distinction between what is proper for the Church of God and what is proper for private houses. “What?” (he exclaims), “have ye not houses to eat and drink in? Or do ye despise the Church of God?”
3. The third reason is that these meetings tend to destroy the fundamental distinction between the Church and the world—between what is sacred and what is secular.
The blotting-out of this distinction introduces confusion and every evil work into the visible Church and all other spheres of life.
As an illustration of the difference between Church and world let us notice the relations of Church and State. Church and State are both divine institutions under Christ, but their provinces are distinct. The Church is not at liberty to do the work of the State, nor the State the work of the Church. What would be perfectly lawful for the one institution to do would be quite unlawful for the other. For example, it would not be proper for the office-bearers of the Church, as such, to look after the common taxes, or for the officers of the State to administer the Sacraments. Each “power” must exercise itself within its own province, and much harm has come to both “powers” by unwarrantable interference on the part of one or other.
An important illustration of the sacred and the secular is also to be found in the divinely ordained difference between the Sabbath and the other six days of the week. Things which are quite lawful to be done on week-days are not lawful on the Sabbath. It is perfectly lawful to buy and sell on a week-day, but not so on the Lord’s Day. God has not only appointed certain kinds of business as lawful, but He has arranged the times and places when and where the business is to be done, and so it is not enough that the thing to be done is in itself lawful, the time and place must also be lawful. It is lawful, as we have remarked, to buy and sell; but what would be thought of the man that would do so within the precincts of God’s house during the time of worship? And again, what opinion would be formed of a Church that would arrange a certain amount of time on the Lord’s Day before, in the middle, or after divine worship, for buying and selling? Our natural sense of religion, apart from any higher emotion, would at once declare such a proceeding as preposterous and profane; and yet buying and selling are in themselves things perfectly lawful.
In like manner, let it be observed that it is quite lawful for any man to entertain his friends to a feast in his private house, but it is not lawful to introduce common feasting or other secular entertainments into meetings or services forming a part of the work of God’s house. Christian people may safely meet at table in one another’s houses, and the common meal may be raised or sanctified by their mutual intercourse, but to introduce the ordinary entertainments of life into the Church, is to declare that imperfect which is absolutely perfect, as if the precious things of God needed assistance from the flesh. Holy things are thus brought down to the level of the secular and worldly—the distinction between the two classes is seriously defaced—and an inlet is made for all manner of folly and corruption.
The process of degeneration in these matters may begin in a comparatively simple way. First, the plain tea meeting, then the frivolous soiree, and lastly the thorough-going carnal concert, when the Church becomes nothing better than a theatre, with an outward veneer of Christianity.
David Brainerd’s View of Eternity.
“Let me tell you, my brother, eternity is another thing than we ordinarily take it to be in a healthful state. O how vast and boundless; how fixed and unalterable. Of what infinite importance is, that we be prepared for eternity! I have been just a-dying now for more than a week, and all around me have thought me so; but in this time I have had clear views of eternity. I have seen the blessedness of the godly in some measure, and longed to share their happy state. I have also been comfortably satisfied that through grace I shall do so; but O what anguish is raised in my mind to think of an eternity for those who are Christless, for those who are mistaken, and who bring their false hopes to the grave with them! The sight was so dreadful that I could by no means bear it. My thoughts recoiled and I said (but under a more affecting sense than ever before), Who can dwell with everlasting burnings?”