more havoc as an angel of light than as a roaring lion. Liberalism and modernism have stolen schools and churches where once the Gospel sounded forth and have turned them into Ichabod Memorials, sad monuments to a glory now departed. The old fun damentalist-modernist controversy had its faults, but at least it brought the issue into the light. To day BELIEF IS TRYING TO GET ALONG WITH UNBELIEF. Religious bodies boast of including in their membership those who accept and those who deny cardinal doctrines of the faith. Some who call themselves conservatives heap scorn on fun damentalists but it is to be noticed that they have no condemnation for liberals. Two cannot walk together except they be agreed. A New Testament that bids us welcome no false teachers into our houses, reject heretics after the first and second admonition and let preachers of another gospel be damned, certainly offers no encouragement to believers to try getting along in faith and practice with unbelievers. We are to live peaceably with all men but not at the cost of convictions. Paul’s being all things to all men does not mean compromising the truth in order to have fellowship with those who deny it. The new appeasement and tolerance confers upon false teachers a status which is not theirs. There can be no peaceful co-existence with false doctrine. That has been tried in days past and where man tried to get along with heresy and have peace at any price, the flag of infidelity now flies. “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with un righteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? . . . or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?” There is no “getting along” there! Furthermore, THE CHURCH IS TRYING TO GET ALONG WITH THE WORLD. This is an other impossibility. God calls it adultery. “ Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? who soever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4 :4 ). There can be no concord between Christ and Belial. “ If any man love the world, the love o f the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). We are strangers and pil grims here. “This world is our passage but not our portion.” “ This world is not your rest.” The Chris tian who sings: “There is no other way but the way of the cross”
must be prepared for the last verse: “Then I bid farewell to the way of the world, To walk in it nevermore.” The church has lost her pilgrim character and is trying to get along with a world system that is no friend of grace to help her on to God. Ever since Constantine joined the church and made it fashionable, this policy of peaceful co-existence with a pagan age has been popular but the true church and the world can never mix. We are in deed in the world though not of it and must indeed rub elbows with it. I am not speaking o f that brand of Pharisaism which is separated from sin ners but not from sin. Nor am I thinking merely of card-playing, dancing and a few other selected sins. I mean the lust o f the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life, all that pertains to this unregenerate humanity. Coming now to the individual Christian and his spiritual experience, we find all too often THE NEW NATURE TRYING TO GET ALONG WITH THE OLD. Here again there qan never be peaceful co-existence. “The carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Rom. 8 :7 ). The average Christian has never moved into the lib erty of the eighth chapter of Romans. Indeed one wonders whether most of them have ever reached even the seventh chapter for they are not trou bled about their defeated lives. Can the blessed ness of the eighth chapter be reached without something of the bitterness of the seventh? We came into this world with an old nature. When we were born again we received a new na ture. There can be no armistice between the two. But there can be victory through the Spirit. And “ there is no substitute for victory.” But the new man cannot “ get along” with the old. He is to put off the old man, not put up with him. The flesh is to be dealt with not by compromise but by cru cifixion. “ Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:14). That does not sound like getting along with old Adam. Somehow we have gotten the strange idea that as Christians it is our business to get along with everything and everybody. We are not public-re lations agents out to get the church and the world together. We have gotten them together to an alarming degree, at the cost of our power and tes timony. The Scriptures do not encourage such
THE KING'S BUSINESS
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