The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Religion
The World's Great Sermons, Volume 09: Cuyler to Van Dyke
Sermons
You may believe that there is the danger of the Church--shall I
say?--growing stereotyped in its forms, by checking the freedom of
individual life. There is the danger, on the other side, of the
Church, as it were, spreading itself in the aggregation of splendid
individualities; and because men believe intensely in their own
mission, because they can not but see that the beam which they
are hewing down is one of paramount importance to take some place
in supporting the temple of God, they are inclined to prefer the
attitude of isolation. Is this wise, and is it well? Pardon me if
I ask you to say that this spirit, if allowed to grow, is a spirit
which, from its various aspects, is one which, by all means in
our power, we ought to set our faces against. Our own beam is not
the temple of God. Each move and form of religious thought is not
comprehensive of the whole; but it is here where men, choosing
their own beam, begin to believe in their own, and their own alone,
and seek to impose that little thing of their own as tho it were
an absolute necessity of every portion of God's Church, that you
get the spirit of actual division. "The whole is greater than its
part." If we could only bring the aphorisms of ordinary life into
the bearings of the Church of God we should be happier. But, let me
assure you, when a man has his beam, and tells me that that beam
will be built into the temple of God, will support its roof, and
perhaps be the very thing which will add new dignity to the splendid
arch which will spring from it, I am content to accept it. Let him
believe anything that will beautify and extend. But when he tells
me that it is catholicity to believe in his beam being all, he
simply, as it were, sins against the very thing he is seeking to
maintain. It is a sign of intellectual mediocrity; it is the spirit
of sectarianism; it is the spirit ultimately of skepticism. When
a man believes that pious views, which have been found profitable
to his own soul, are to be made the rule for the whole catholic
Church; when he tells me that special hours for special services
are essential for the well-being of all Christian souls; when he
tells me that special attitudes in the house of God are essential to
catholicity, it is intellectual mediocrity, as the brilliant French
poet has written which can not comprehend anything beyond itself.
It is a spirit of sectarianism; for what, I pray, do you mean by
sectarianism, if it is not this spirit, that you exaggerate your own
particular doctrine into such proportions as to make men feel that
there is none other than that? You are of your own little Church,
and you are doubtful of the rest of the world. That is the spirit of
sectarianism, and that, if you understand it rightly, is the only
fault of skepticism; for to believe that God is to be narrowed down
to the conception of such a thing as that, to believe that God's
temple is to be brought down to the measure of your own little beam,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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