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He is left in such abject poverty and helplessness that he is obliged to call the sister of his departed wife to his own and the assistance of his children. With his limited surroundings, and in these circumstances, a speedy marriage is the least of the evils that are likely to ensue.
The principle of affinity, however, secures for the social circle of humanity a loftier, purer, and more blessed condition of life than consanguinity does or can do. It inbreathes into the individual life of man the diviner, brotherlier, and universal affection; it enlarges the sphere of human love, and ennobles the life of man. It lifts him out of the selfish, the false, and superstitious, by introducing him into the true, the self-sacrificing, the God-like. And just as Christianity advances, will the nations be raised into the realisation of the higher conditions of affinity.
The duty of the Church is not to intermeddle with the political affairs of the State, or by a mistaken zeal for purity to attempt by forms of discipline to coerce her members into the life of love. By so doing she only attempts an impossibility, and secures an opposite result. In such efforts she mistakes her mission, loses her enviable opportunities of doing her Master’s work, enslaves herself in the trammels of superstition, and fails in the end of her high calling of God. Her members are not to cherish the spirit of thanking God that they are not like other men, each demanding of his brother that he comply with his interpretation of inspired truth, else he will anathematise, and refuse to hold brotherly intercourse with him.
Such would be to act on a principle that would prevent union in the Church of Christ, co-operation of brethren—a principle which only divides and destroys. The disciples of Jesus are to pursue the things which make for peace, the things wherewith, they edify one another. They are to forbear with one another in love; to walk together, in so far as they are agreed, in the confidence that by so doing God will bring them into oneness in the things regarding which they differ.
By so doing the members of the Church will present to the world such a spectacle of heavenly power, commanding majesty, Christian love, as will draw its attention to the power of its regeneration created for its salvation by the Incarnate Lord of Glory, yielding to its enmity on the cross of Calvary—the power which alone can awaken in the heart of man supreme love to God, fellow love to his brother; draw men out of their selfishness into the true knowledge of human well-being; and thus glorify Christ, save souls, secure a lovely and blissful condition of human society on earth.
If, on the other hand, ecclesiastics forget what manner of spirit they ought to be of, cling to their individual or party shibboleths, wrangle about hair-splittings, denounce and anathematise one another, hear not the voice of God speaking to them in the events of His providence in connection with His Church, then will they
