IT seems deplorable that the aftermath in our country of the Great War should consist, among other things, in widespread internal strife and contention. It was thought by many during the War-time that the exigencies of that stressful period had created a new bond of brotherhood between high and low, rich and poor, master and servant. All classes were then bound together by a deep sense of the value of our national standing and privileges, and by the comradeship and discipline of the various services, and it was believed that the strong tie which was then formed would endure after the conflict was past, and would tend to strengthen and uplift the life of the Empire, ushering in, indeed, a new era of national progress and prosperity, in every good and desirable sense. But we regret we have lived to see results of a very different kind. The moral and spiritual advance has not taken place, and social unity is hard to find. Strikes and revolutionary movements are the order of the day.
Too much, of course, was expected by the greater number from the pressing circumstances of the War. External influences will not permanently and radically change the inward disposition of fallen humanity. They will not create the “new heart and right spirit.” Nothing but the Gospel of Christ, accompanied by the power of the Holy Ghost, will effect this happy result, but these divinely-appointed agencies are little reckoned of by the vast majority of people in our own nation as well as in others. Hence the sanguine expectations, based upon natural conditions, have been entirely unrealised.
Now, such questions as the following have occurred to us in view of the commotions of the present time:—”How has it come about in the course of divine providence that things are as they are—that there is such an uprising against those who have wealth and power? Are there any elements in the professing Church that have contributed to the widespread spirit of rebellion against authority, and to the lack of friendly and trustful co-operation between high and low, employers and employed, leading to strikes and suchlike forms of revolt?” We shall endeavour briefly to answer these questions.
The answer to the first question is that God is punishing the higher classes for their oppression of the poor in past times. He visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children. No one must think that we have the slightest desire to be unfair to those who occupy the higher ranks of society—we believe they are often very unjustly maligned by the spirit of envy and jealousy—but the truth must be told that there has been room in the past for the charge which the Apostle James brought against the great in his own day: “Do not rich men oppress you and draw you before the judgment seats? . . . Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you” (chapters ii. and v.). True, there were, and are, noble exceptions to this account among the wealthy, but the description can well be applied to many past and present, and the day of retribution has come, which also finds its portraiture in the Epistle of James: “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire.” The Lord, in righteous judgment, is now permitting the poor to oppress the rich, and while this providential aspect of the case does not and cannot justify unrighteous demands from any quarter, yet the fact of retribution for sin has to be recognised by all right-thinking men.
There are also elements in the professing Church that have largely contributed to the present unsettlement. One of these is the kind of religious teaching that has been given for many years from the majority of pulpits. This teaching has been, to say the least, seriously defective. Neither law nor Gospel is properly preached, so that we do not wonder at the social disorder that has arisen. Ministers, for example, are exceedingly deficient in their presentation of the law of God, which is also the law of Christ. The sum of the ten commandments is: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul and strength and mind, and thy neighbour as thyself.” These commands are not expounded by the pulpit in their full meaning and spirituality, so as to show forth the glory of the law in its holy, just, and good requirements, and to bring home the conviction of shortcoming and transgression to the hearers. It is the man who is thus convinced of the excellency of the divine standard of love to God and love to his neighbour, who will seek the divine method of attaining and exercising these gracious dispositions. But the popular way now-a-days is to flatter people into the opinion that they are keeping all the commandments if they show a superficial regard to some of them. Then, there is one precept which it is a common thing to undervalue and ignore as out of date, namely, the Fourth Commandment—”Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy,” etc.; and this treatment of it by the pulpit is fitted to undermine regard in the minds of the hearers for all the commandments. If people are at liberty to rob God and themselves of the sacred day of worship and rest, they can, with slight provocation, set at nought any of His precepts. The modern pulpit, further, says little as to the penalties (especially in the world to come) for disobedience to God’s Word and laws. Hell is not in the new theology. The salutary fear of future punishment has been taken away, and men blasphemously think that they can defy their Creator, Lawgiver, and Benefactor, with impunity. An atheistic socialism is, to a considerable extent, behind the present revolutionary movements. There is no anxiety to maintain the divinely ordered relations in society, and to give to each class its due. “Every man for himself and no other,” is the motto.
Similarly, the ministers of our time are gravely deficient in their presentation of the Gospel of Christ. In fact, it is not in any proper sense the Gospel at all which a vast number preach. Many sermons are delivered in which there is no mention of sin or of Christ. Both the fact and the doctrine of His vicarious atonement are set aside, and the necessity of regeneration or the new birth is never once mentioned. Salvation by imitation of Christ’s example is the popular gospel doctrine of our time—a new edition of the old legal gospel, “Do and live,” which has slain eternally every fallen sinner that has sought to gain heaven by it. We have no hesitation in declaring that salvation without the atonement and the new birth is an absolute impossibility, and it is very clear that the modern Gospel, which leaves out those fundamental truths, has not saved men from sin and wickedness in this present world, not to speak of the world to come. The condition of things to-day is clear and definite proof.
We lay the responsibility of the strife and animosity that exist to-day between the various classes of society largely at the door of the modern gospel. It supplies no dynamic power for the regeneration or elevation of society. Is it not an extraordinary thing that the progress of the Higher Criticism, and the preaching of the gospel of love, without law, atonement, or regeneration, have gone on contemporaneously with one another for the last thirty or forty years? And what have been the results? A great War abroad of unprecedented havoc in the loss of millions of human lives, and of treasure almost incalculable, and flagrant immorality, strife, and bloodshed at home that are well-nigh bringing to wreck and ruin our national existence. May the Lord hear the prayers of His people and send forth anew His pure Gospel among us as a nation and to the ends of the earth!