No man ought to be shut
out of Christ's Church who has the love of God and the love of
humanity in his heart. That seems to me quite clear. I don't like
to say we make too much of the creeds, but I do say that we don't
make half enough of the morality of Christ. That's where I should
like to see the real test applied.
What I should like to see would be a particular and individual
profession of the Beatitudes. I should like to see congregations
stand up, face to the East, do anything, I mean, that marks this
profession out as something essential and personal, and so recite
the Beatitudes. There might be a great sifting, but it would bring
home the reality of the Christian demand to the heart and
conscience of the world. After all, that's our ideal, isn't
it?--the City of God. If we all concentrated on this ideal,
realising that the morality of Christ is essential, I don't think
there would be much bother taken, outside professional circles,
about points of doctrine.
Then, writes the interviewer, arose the question of fervour. "Can the
City of God be established without some powerful impulse of the human
heart? Can it ever be established, for example, by the detached and self
satisfied intellectual priggishness of the subsidised sixpenny review,
or by the mere violence of the Labour extremist's oratory? Must there
not be something akin to the evangelical enthusiasm of the last century,
something of a revivalist nature? And yet have we not outgrown anything
of the kind?
"To Canon Temple the answer presents itself in this way: Rarer than
Christian charity is Christian faith.
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