I read the other day a
passage from a printed sermon of an orthodox type, an acrid outcry
against Liberalism in religion, which may illustrate what I mean.
"To St. Paul and St. John," said the preacher, "the natural or
carnal man is hopelessly remote from God; the same Lord who came to
make possible for man this intimate communion with God is careful
to make it clear that this communion is only possible to redeemed,
regenerate man; prior to new birth into the Kingdom of God, far
from being a son of God, man is, according to the Lord Himself, a
child of the devil, however potentially capable of being translated
from death into life."
Such teaching is so horrible and abominable that it is hard to find
words to express one's sense of its shamefulness. To attribute it
to the Christ, who came to seek and save what is lost, is an act of
traitorous wickedness. If Christ had made it His business to
thunder into the ears of the outcasts, whom He preferred to the
Scribes and Pharisees, this appalling message, where would His
teaching be? What message of hope would it hold for the soul? Such
a view of Christianity as this insults alike the soul and the mind
and the heart; it deliberately insults God; the message of Christ
to the vilest human spirit is that it is indeed, in spite of all
its corruption, its falls, its shame, in very truth God's own
child; it calls upon the sinner to recognise it, it takes for
granted that he feels it.
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