Remarks on an Address Entitled “The Nation and Its God.”

THE Free Church Council in England is a gathering of representative men from the various larger dissenting bodies there, such as the Congregational, Baptist, and Presbyterian. The dominant note of this gathering is that of the broad school in theology. The Council met during the past month at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and the new President was the Rev. Alexander Connell, B.D., of Sefton Park Presbyterian Church, Liverpool. His opening address was entitled “The Nation and Its God.” As Mr. Connell is a Scotsman and a native of the Highlands, who was brought up amidst orthodox surroundings in the Free Church of thirty years ago, we have scanned his presidential address with more than usual interest, as it appears in the columns of the “British Weekly.” Mr. Connell makes it plain that he does not now adhere to the creed that he was taught at his father’s fireside, but at the same time he voluntarily expresses the doubt as to whether he has replaced it with anything better. He casts his eye also over the Churches around him, and practically gives away the case for the supposed religious progress of the present day. His address is a plain concession (whether he fully realises the thing or not) that the modern Churches have lost infinitely more than they have gained—they have gained new ideas of destructive Biblical criticism, and new forms of worship, with cornet, flute, organ, and all kinds of Babylonian music, but they have lost God—the most precious of all treasures—without whose presence everything else is less than nothing, and vanity. Mr. Connell’s text is the saying of a friend of his, who seemed to some extent alive to this loss, and who exclaimed on one occasion, “We have somehow lost our grip of God.” Mr. Connell endorses the truth of this statement, and proceeds to give proofs or illustrations of it, but fails to acknowledge the real roots of the evil or to point out adequately the proper remedy. We shall notice a few things that emerge from the surface of his address.

1. Mr. Connell gives us a glimpse of the inner history of the man who has left behind him the Scriptural Calvinistic faith of his childhood, and has adopted the broad creed of the present day. He does so from his own history and experience. He recalls the faith of his father, and compares his own with it. “Forgive,” he says, “an intimate reference. The man to whom I owe, humanly speaking, whatever spell lies on my being of the sovereign will of God, turned with joy to such books as Baxter’s ‘Saints’ Rest’ and Bunyan’s ‘Grace Abounding.’ In memory I can see him standing on the headland of a Highland loch, looking over the sea, as I waved my farewell to him. Stern and grey and solemn he stood, as his native hills, and deep-rooted, as I think no other man I ever knew, in the consciousness of God. I would surrender much could I claim to-day that man’s simple and unescapable sense of God. ‘We had fathers of our flesh, which corrected us, and we gave them reverence,’ for they struck into our soul a note of destiny that can never again fall to silence. But there is a change. Frankly, I cannot say my taste lies to the same venerable line of tradition. And the question that alarms me is this: Have I replaced the old taste with something as profound? Are the men and women who stand for religion to-day, who are going to give the tone to the next generation, in contact with great voices, ancient and modern, that will stir for them the deeps of the soul and cast on them the spell of a holy God?”

Mr. Connell here clearly allows that his father possessed a “simple and unescapable sense of God” which he has not, but which he would fain enjoy, and he also recalls the fact that this consciousness of God was associated with a certain “venerable line of tradition” to which he tells us his taste does not now lie. He was, of course, at one time under the influence of this line of tradition, as he describes it “but there is a change,” and yet, remarkable to relate, he frankly admits that “the question which alarms” him, is, “Have I replaced the old taste with something as profound?” Now, let us notice that these self-revelations are exceedingly far-reaching and infinitely suggestive. Here is a voice direct from the depths of the soul of an able, cultured man who was nurtured in a sound Biblical faith, but who has adopted the lax Arminian creed of the present time. It is a confession that he has made an exchange for the worse. His new faith, with its supposed advance in knowledge and freedom, instead of leading him nearer to God has had the effect of putting him farther away from God. He can recall the invaluable sense of God which his father had along with adherence to a “venerable line of tradition,” which phrase, rightly interpreted, means “the faith once delivered unto the saints,” and he can observe and confess his own lack of this sense along with his adoption of newer theology. If this is not a testimony entirely in favour of the old faith, and entirely against the new, we know not what else it is. He says in a subsequent part of his address that “the democracy which loses hold of God, loses hold of everything.” We strongly endorse the sentiment, and seriously commend its individual application to Mr. Connell’s consideration. We are fully convinced that Mr. Connell has spoken for thousands of others in this country who are not conscientious or frank enough to confess the melancholy truth of their utter want of God under conditions supposedly more enlightened than those of a previous generation.

1. Mr. Connell points out that the weakness of the sense of God which he illustrates from his own experience is characteristic in a marked degree of the Churches and Nation in general. His terms are sometimes rather roundabout and halting, but the scope of his discourse is that faith in the authority, claims and presence of God is at a low ebb among professing Christians throughout the country, and that a worldly materialistic disposition is largely in the ascendant. Even people who are taking an active part in what is considered Christian work are not living as conscious of the all-seeing eye of God, or seeking true fellowship with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ. Almost everything is done in a carnal business style with little regard to the approval or glory of God. The awe of things unseen and eternal, is far from them, and formal, mechanical attention to religious duties and services is the order of the day. God is but very rarely in their thoughts at all. The world has carnalised the Church, and spiritual death reigns where the life of God should be. A worldly spirit also pervades the nation (which let us remember consists largely of the same persons in their civil capacities and relations), and Mr. Connell suggests that the Church as such is responsible to a large extent for the general decline, in the following sentence. “And if for a moment the Church has been unwary or has slept at its post, if it has lowered its standards or coarsened its temper, when it should have stood sentinel in God’s name over the sanctuary of our national ideals, is it strange that it should feel the stress?” So far, so good. There is a partial recognition of the facts that the nation has departed from God, and that the Churches have become unwatchful, compromising and worldly. But when we examine Mr. Connell’s analysis of the causes that have led to this state of matters, we find him wanting.

2. Mr. Connell dismisses the “altered attitude to the Scriptures” as a chief contributory cause to the present declension, and justifies as “true and enriching” the supposed “light which scholars have shed on the method and process of Revelation.” “It is idle (he proceeds) to ask us to reject the facts that convince; we cannot be false to our conscience, or to the truths to which God guides us. If we are but suffering from the necessary readjustment of mind which belongs to a transition age, we need not have a shadow of fear. Utter loyalty to the truth, as, and when God reveals it, will bring us infallibly to a riper wisdom and surer hold of God.” We put our amen to the last sentence. But the question arises, “Does the newer light, which the Higher Critics have shed on Revelation, consist of facts and truths as Mr. Connell declares them to be?” After long reflection on such matters, we unhesitatingly answer “No; their facts are fancies and their truths are lies.” We have seen and read nothing for the last twenty years that has convinced us that the Bible is anything else from Genesis to Revelation but the inspired Word of God. The whole system of higher critical interpretation is based upon an infidel evolutionary theory of the development of religion in the race. It ignores the supreme testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ, and undermines the fundamental doctrines of the faith concerning sin and the atonement and the work of the Holy Ghost. It is not God, but the devil that has guided men into this labyrinth of error, and there were some teachers in the earlier Free Church who, wrong themselves, led astray Mr. Connell and many other poor unwary students with a “will o’ the wisp” of advanced critical knowledge of the Holy Scriptures.

No wonder that the Spirit of God has departed from the Churches and that the enemy has come in like a flood, when the sword of the Spirit has been broken in shivers by the hand of unbelief within the Christian pale. We ask Mr. Connell and men of his opinion, “Who were the instruments that introduced the Gospel and vital Christianity into these realms? Were they not men who, under the teaching of the Spirit of truth, received the Bible as the Word of God from beginning to end, and preached the whole counsel of God as therein contained?” Under the preaching of such men, there were thousands born again and made new creatures in Christ Jesus—living epistles of Christ, known and read of all men—witnesses who were prepared to die for the truth of the Gospel. And let us be assured that, just as it is in the case of the individual soul, which must be sustained and nourished by the means of the same Word through which it has been born again, so it is in the case of the Church collectively. The Church must be sustained and edified from one generation to another by the ministration of the same Word of God in its purity, through which it originally came into existence. Apart from the supply of this divinely-provided nourishment the professing Church will become a miserable starveling—far from God and from righteousness. This is the condition of affairs that obtains to-day, and it would be good if Mr. Connell and many others had the scales taken off their eyes, to perceive the real root of the disease. The Lord has magnified His Word above all His name, and when His Word is cast out, He departs along with it.

1. Mr. Connell sketches in eloquent language, but very indefinitely, from the point of view of revealed truth, the way by which men are to recover the hold of God that they have lost. Our space wont admit of quotation. Suffice it to say that he presents no clear pathway of Christian doctrine along which they are to return to the sense and fellowship of the Most High, that he almost wholly overlooks the necessity for the agency and power of the Holy Ghost, and that he lays the chief stress upon human effort. He forgets that it is not the creature’s hold of God, but God’s hold of him, that is the fundamental source of life and strength. “Salvation is of the Lord,” and His true children are “kept by the power of God, through faith, unto salvation.” It is much to be feared that the spell of human wisdom and creature religion lies more heavily on the spirit of the new President of the English Free Church Council than the spell of God’s sovereign will which fell upon him in his early years. May the Lord, if it be His good pleasure, cause a return to the truth in its simplicity and purity!