The principle stated is of infinite importance, and we must neither forget it nor distrust it for an hour. All who fear God will confess that we are not to withhold the truth nor compromise with sin, even if the multitude desert our altars to crowd where the cross is lighter or its offense has wholly ceased. But is it true that worldly craft and policy will fail even as a policy? Let another question answer this. Other things being equal among rival denominations, have not the purest in doctrine and the strictest in morals always been the most successful? Churches grow weak by lowering the standard of morals. When there is no discoverable difference between the Church and the world, the Church is no longer loved, or venerated, or believed. It becomes powerless to pull down the strongholds of sin; it can no more stir the heart, nor rouse the conscience, nor reach the mysterious depths of our nature; it ceases to meet the religious wants of those whose hearts God has touched, and men turn away unsatisfied from its shallow waters. The scorner will be loud in his denunciations of religionists whose vows are but the breath of the moment, and whose professions mean nothing. Even the soul convinced of guilt and danger will be afraid to trust to the guidance of a Church which has in it so little of the divine, so little of the power of God. Methodism took at the beginning, and has held to this day, what some might regard as extreme positions on the subject of slavery, worldly amusements, and the drinking customs of the times. What is the verdict of history? Have we damaged ourselves by our fidelity to the right? Some timid, half-convicted people have doubtless been repelled from our communion by the strictness of Methodist discipline and the boldness with which we have assaulted the wrong, but who believes that the Church would have grown more rapidly by compromise and cowardice? Who believes that it would be wise, even according to the wisdom of this world, to compromise with evil now? Zion is not "lengthening her cords and strengthening her stakes" in a Scriptural manner when she "stretches the curtains of her tent" to shelter dancing, card-playing, and wine-bibbing converts. If these should come in crowds, offering on these conditions to join us, we could not receive them. To do so would be to act as madly as would the general who, in an enemy's country, commands his soldiers to throw away their arms, call in the sentinels, and level the intrenchments, in order to gain a few timid recruits who would not wear the uniform an hour if they thought that it meant war.