HERALDS OF GOD
public exactly what it wants, and about ten per cent. more of it than it expects." "Don't go out for popularity," Spurgeon used to implore his students, "preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up but Christ!"
It is quite impossible to preach Christ faithfully without saying many things which will sting the natural heart of man into opposition and rebellion. You will have to declare, for example, that to imagine one can receive God's forgiveness while refusing oneself to be forgiving to others is sophistry and deceit: a hard saying that for many. Or take the doctrine of the divine Fatherhood. There are still those who accept that doctrine and sun themselves in its warm and comforting glow, but resent being confronted with its disconcerting and inexorable implications in the realm of practical brotherhood and social ethics. "Give us the simple Gospel," they cry: escapism rationalizing itself again. Take even the missionary challenge and the conception of a universal Church. We believe that, just as no man is truly awake to-day who has not developed a supra-national horizon to his thinking, so no Church is anything more than a pathetic pietistic backwater unless it is first and fundamentally and all the time a world missionary Church. But there are stubborn strongholds into which that truth has yet to penetrate—minds which, for one reason or another, persistently regard the missionary enterprise as the province of a few enthusiasts, a side-show, an extra: not realizing that here is something which every pro-
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