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ceived, both can be, and is to be, maintained, while the subsidiary expressions, or methods, or outworks, are not only not insisted on, but are carefully, and on principle, suppressed.
This distinction between the reality itself, on the one side, and, on the other, all the expressions and methods, and even interpretations, of the reality, is profoundly unphilosophical. The fact that men greatly differ as to interpretations, expressions and methods, does not in the least degree make it more possible to secure the central reality by dispensing with them all. If impartiality is the object of the community, it is in some other direction than this that impartiality is to be found.
Besides being unphilosophical,—which means really, in the last resort, inherently unpractical,—the effort of undenominationalism is also intensely narrow-minded and unjust. No doubt it is, at the first blush, rather tempting to treat all denominational differences as subordinate. It is the outsider's rough and ready method of attempting to be rid of all questions which he sees to be difficult, and does not care to understand. But to treat them as subordinate, and to try to dispense with them, is in fact already to pronounce a judgment about them. It is to pronounce them to be at best unimportant, and inherently beset with doubt. Men think of undenominationalism as purely negative, as though it taught nothing at all about the things which it omits. On the contrary, it teaches that they are to be omitted; and this, in respect of such things as creeds, ministries and sacraments, necessarily amounts to teaching that they are, at the most, immaterial; and this is hardly distinguishable, if distinguishable at all in experience, from teaching that any earnest teaching about them is positively mischievous because positively false.
It cannot be too often or too strongly insisted that there
