Page:Undenominationalism.djvu/19

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the events of the Gospel story, would, apart from the experience of the Pentecostal Church, be a dream without hope or power?

But if the undenominational method, adopted as a positive principle, and enforced by compulsion of law upon those who regard it with abhorrence, is found to be so profoundly unphilosophical in basis and so gallingly unjust in incidence; where is the remedy? An Education Law has become in modern times the business of the community as a whole. The community as a whole does not believe in the Church, and Churchmanship cannot be imposed upon the community. Of course it cannot. The community as a whole can only be perfectly just by being perfectly impartial between denominations. Such perfect impartiality can never be attained by imposing upon them all what is unjust to almost all of them, but unjust in almost incredibly unequal degrees of injustice. How then can it be obtained? By precisely the opposite method: the method which gives expression to the only true justice, the only true liberalism; the method of rigidly impartial denominationalism.

The community as a whole need not be, and is not, indifferent to religion. It need not, and does not, acquiesce in deliberately non-Christian education. But it must deal with the fact, which, whether deplorable or not, is at all events fundamental for the purpose, that Christians are sharply divided from one another. It is not, then, to be impartial as between religious and irreligious education. In England, at least, it does not need to be impartial as between Christian and non-Christian education. But so long as the different forms of Christianity differ as they do differ, it cannot wisely identify itself for this purpose with any one denomination more than another. Least of all can it, without frantic unwisdom, invent a new denomination of its own, under whatever specious title, and identify