And your church may be small. For many of the
congregation have gone to the church around the other corner, which
is mainly a cluster of associations, having excellent names, and
useful for almost every purpose except building up a manly, rugged,
heroic, godlike character. The minister there, they will tell you,
preaches delightful sermons. They make you "feel so good." He
annihilates pantheism, and his denunciations of materialism are
eloquent in the extreme. But his incarnations of materialism are
Huxley and Darwin, and to the uncharitable he seems to almost
carefully avoid any language which might seem to reflect upon the
dollar- and place-worship of some of the occupants of his front
pews. Now, I am not here to defend Mr. Huxley or Mr. Darwin.
Withstand them to the face wherever they are to be blamed. And for
some utterances they are undoubtedly to be blamed, honest souls as
they were. But I for one cannot help feeling that there is among the
"dwellers in Jerusalem" a materialism of the heart which is
indefinitely worse than any intellectual heresy. When you hit at the
one heresy strike hard at the other also.
Many will have left your little church of Smyrna. It had to be so.
For the divine sifting process, which is natural selection on its
highest plane, has not ceased to work.
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