Page:Christian Marriage.djvu/157

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UNDER MODERN CONDITIONS
141

and to carry into the popular acceptance, by continual affirmation, and far more by general illustration, the principles of the Gospel. The temptation of the Church under modern conditions is to draw apart from the popular life, repudiating its moral laxity, and marking by a deep dividing line of artificial discipline the frontiers of Christianity. It is both unreasonable and unjust to yield to this temptation.

The unreasonableness is sufficiently apparent when it is remembered that the very reason of the Church's existence is the moral regeneration of mankind, and therefore that retirement from the attempt to leaven with Christian principles the general life implies nothing less for the Church than self-stultification. injustice consists in the refusal to allow for the novel situation which now confronts statesmen. The mere scale of modern communities is itself a difficult and dismaying circumstance, which adds immensely to the perplexities of Government, but the wholly The