LIMITS OF SANCTIFICATION
Holiness is popular. There is great
danger of its being carried too far. Already the effort is being made to
sanctify things that cannot be sanctified.
There is a limit to the subjects of
sanctification. There are some things which, from their nature, are not
capable of being made holy. The best mathematician cannot teach an ox the
multiplication table, or teach a horse algebra. A church raised up in the
providence of God to spread Scriptural holiness through the land, cannot make
gambling holy, or sanctify pride. The things which God forbids, should be put
away and not reformed. All attempts at reforming things forbidden by the word
of God, should be abandoned. God lays the axe at the root of the tree. Let
us ply our blows there, and though the tree may seem as flourishing as ever,
yet work on and it will fall when the roots are severed. You may trim at the
branches and show results in the handful of severed twigs you bear off in
triumph, but the tree will only be the more vigorous from the pruning.
Money-worship cannot be sanctified. In the eyes
of the world men are estimated less by their worth than by their wealth. The
ability to gain and hold wealth is treated as a cardinal virtue. Bad,
incompetent men are elected and appointed to high official positions, for no
other reason than because they are rich. This mammon worship is wrong. It
is idolatry. It is degrading to manhood and insulting to God. It is wholly
bad -- bad in itself. It cannot be sanctified by taking it into the house of
God and making it contribute to the support of the Gospel. It is as wrong to
give a man a seat in the house of God because he is rich, as it is to give him
a seat in Congress, or in the Cabinet, for the same reason. It is as wicked
to trade in pews as it is to trade in votes. It is just as corrupt to buy
one's way to a front seat in a church, as it is to buy a seat in the
Legislature. The principle that lies at the bottom is, a servile
acknowledgment of the Almighty Dollar. It is giving money preference over the
man. It is placing a lower estimate upon Christian virtues than upon money.
It paying the homage to gold that is due only to merit. This principle cannot
be sanctified. It should be put away from the house of God entirely. Men
should stand there, as men. There should no preference be given to one over
another on account of wealth. The rich and he poor should meet together,
feeling that the Lord is the Maker of us all.
Pride cannot be sanctified. It may be
introduced into holy places, but such an introduction does not make it holy.
A jewel may be inserted in the flesh -- heathens hang them in the nose --
Christians in the ears -- but it does not become flesh. It may produce
inflammation, but it cannot add to the strength. Pride may enter largely into
the construction and furnishing of edifices consecrated to sacred uses, but
this does not render the pride sacred. God speaks of those who anciently
introduced unauthorized refinements into His worship, as
"A people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face;
that sacrificeth in gardens, and burneth incense upon altars of brick." -- Isa.
65:3.
To display pride and fashion-badges of the love of the world in the church, is
as if the wife should present herself to her husband adorned with the rings and
jewels of his wicked rival and enemy.
"Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship
of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever, therefore, will be a friend of the
world is the enemy of God." -- Jas.
4:4.
The attempt to sanctify the drama, by making
Sabbath school children actors; the church the theater, and preachers and
leaders the managers, can only result in dragging the actors down, instead of
elevating the stage. Priests and monks tried the same experiment hundreds of
years ago, taking their characters from the Bible, and their spirit from the
world, until they made Christianity contemptible, by sinking its votaries to
the level of the heathen, in morality.
The effort to sanctify things which should have
been put away, has been a prolific cause of the corruption of the church in all
ages. After the conversion of Constantine, the Bishops in their zeal for the
conversion of the heathen, adopted the heathen rites and called them by
Christian names; just as the Churches now, to draw in the world, adopt worldly
pleasures and attempt to throw over them a religious garb. Mosheim says, "The
rites and institutions, by which the Greeks, Romans, and other nations, had
formerly testified their religious veneration for fictitious deities, were now
adopted, with some slight alterations, by Christian bishops, and employed in
the service of the true God. These fervent heralds of the Gospel, whose zeal
outran their candor and integrity, imagined that the nations would receive
Christianity with more facility, when they saw the rites and ceremonies to
which they were accustomed, adopted in the church, and the same worship paid to
Christ and His martyrs, which they had formerly offered to their idol deities.
Hence it happened, that, in these times, the religion of the Greeks and Romans
differed very little, in its external appearance, from that of the Christians.
They had both a most pompous and splendid ritual. Gorgeous robes, miters,
tiaras, wax-tapers, crosiers, processions, lustrations, images, gold and silver
vases, and many such circumstances of pageantry, were equally to be seen in the
heathen temples and in the Christian churches."
From the fiercest persecutions the church of
Jesus Christ rapidly recovered and came out purer and stronger from the fiery
ordeal. But from the attempt to sanctify heathen rites and heathen temples
the church has never recovered. The most numerous and the most powerful of
all the churches that bear the Christian name, the Roman Catholic, has today
more of the spirit and practice of the old pagan churches than of the church
founded by Jesus Christ.