The Potter and the ClayWinnington Ingram, Arthur F. (Arthur Foley)
Religion
The Potter and the Clay
Winnington Ingram, Arthur F. (Arthur Foley)
Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 20th century; World War, 1914-1918 -- Sermons
And my answer shall be given to that, not in anger, but in sadness:
"And have you during this last twenty-five years fought the wild
beast yourself in this great city? Have you yourself practised
strict self-denial to the point of sacrifice, in dealing with the
drink question, to help the weak brethren for whom CHRIST died? Have
you crushed down the wild beast of lust in yourself, and grappled
with the haunts of vice, as many in London have done for twenty-five
years? Have you seen that there is a Mission Church among every
eight thousand people as they have come into London, and given of
your substance to plant one? Have you done your best to see that
every sailor that goes from our ports is a Christian, and that every
trader who trades throughout the world, and every bank clerk who has
been to work in Berlin or Paris, lives up to his religion? Have you
given every available penny to spread the Gospel, the failure of
which you now deplore, throughout the world? Or have you spoken of
'sending money out of the country,' of the uselessness of Christian
servants, and repeated the travellers' tales about Missions of those
who have never visited a missionary station in their lives, when you
have been asked to support Mission work abroad?"
Then, until you have done that, I refuse you the right to speak of
the weakness of the religion which you have failed to support. It is
only promised that "they shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy
mountain" when "the earth is filled with the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea."
But what if we have never really attempted to fill the earth
with the knowledge of the LORD? What if we have only very feebly
attempted to know this ourselves? What if, as a consequence of
spending less than a million a year on Foreign Missions, we are now
having to spend five millions a day on a war made necessary by the
neglect of our Christian duty?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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