Sunday at Home.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 17, 22 July 1893, Page 10

Sunday at Home.

A REPLY TO THE CHURCH’S CRITICS.

The utterances in Bristol of “General” Booth and Mr Ben Tillett drew from the Rev. Urijah R. Thomas a special sermon on a recent Sunday evening. It was preached to a large congregation at Redland Park Chapel, Bristol. Pounding his discourse on the words, “ Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” the preacher, in the course of his address, said: —If for a moment I stay to explain why I am thus careful to reply to the voices from the People’s Palace and Colston Hall that have impeached the churches, I reply because I would not have the Church of Christ so disparaged by misrepresentation that you young men and women should be tempted to feel there is no honour, no sanctity, no joy- in relationship with such an institution. The ideal is sublime ; even the realisation is glorious. Be it yours to nerve and strengthen and enrich the church in its progress towards the ideal. For I have no word of recrimination, still less of retaliation, for our censors. Much of what each of them, as passionately earnest men, fear about the condition of things is terribly true. General Booth utters no word that is too strong about the needs of the Church in its own life. Aid. Tillett does not paint one shade too darkly the sorrows of the needy, or the shame of the self-indulgent. It is for ns to let the wounds they inflict be healed lightly or superficially. Charles Kingsley once suggested that if the Church of Christ lived up to her ideal but for one whole week, the world would be converted before the end of the year. If but the younger generation in the church would set itself, and would seek help from God to-be “ out-and-out ” Christians, “out-and-out ” in convictions, “ out-and-out ” in consecration, there could be little doubt that the end of the next twenty-five years would find tkat it could be deemed intolerable for any man, however respectable conventionally, who lived a life of sleek selfishness and bovine contentment, to be called a Christian at all. He would be deemed as anomalous as a white negro or an honest thief. And such a church would have made it impossible that our most brilliant cities should have the slums of vice and want that aie our bitter reproach to-day, and would have made it impossible to doubt that, were every mercenary motive swept away, there would be any lack of loyal volunteer soldier-members of the Church of the living God.