THE KING’S BUSINESS
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ist’s search lor the presence of the acid with the blue litmus paper, we can detect a trace of Sacramentarian- ism in our Presbyterian custom and habit. Here it is : in an ordinary country parish the communicants are entered on the official records as 2,000. On an ordinary Sabbath cen sus the church, and you will find the attendance not a tenth of that. In Scotland the man is happy who preaches to a couple of hundreds. Now, let “Sascramint Sawbath” come round, and lo! “the gathering of the clans!” From high hill and deep glen they come, by brae, and burn and heather heath, the 2,000, young and old, poor and rich, feeble and forceful, wend their way in wet skin or dry skin to the House of God. How is all this ? The “Sacramint” to-day is to swing them on by grace conferred, by bood got, to the next Communion, a whole year before them! Sacramentarianism—oh, what a mistake! Unconverted communi cant, rather rise from that Table of the Lord, and fling that cup beneath your feet and depart than dare to drink it. Hear this word of God: “He that eateth and drinketh un worthily, eateth and drinketh damna tion to himself.” The great eternity of your God-given soul is a structure too mighty for this pitiful founda tion. Build on sitting down at the Lord’s Table, will you? As soon build the Pyramids of Egypt on the point of a pin! Not that, not that is “the foundation of God,” The Com munion is for the converted alone and only—are you, communicant, con verted ? “Have ,you been to Jesus for the cleansing power? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb ?” Again, in the “Black Country,’’ and in some other parts of England, you find whole towns tumbling to gether like a passion-emptied cart loads of bricks. Northwich, the salt- centre in Cheshire,, looks like a shock- shaken paralytic—walls bidding good bye to the roof; top stories becoming ground floors, and ground floors tak ing a despairing dip into the cracking depths of the unseen. What in all the world is the matter? What is wrong with the buildings ? The foundation, and the foundation is the Alpha and Omega, the A and the Z of the whole. The earth had been mined and tunnelled and bowelled below for its hidden treasure. Only a thin skin is the ground above this hollowed-out vacuum. Here, again, “there is no foundation.” Anything like this in the spiritual world? Yea, verily. The common profession of the Lord Jesus Christ by the lip of a formal adherence to His visible Church. Coming to' the Communi cant’s Class and “joining the Church” when you are big enough and old enough for the common custom. A fair like foundation to build upon, but where grace has not solidified and rammed together lip and life into an indivisible, incrackable whole, it is but a thin sheet of dangerous decep tion. Below it has been scooped out by that ever-working borer—the world. Below the profession the treasures of earth have been sought after, and found, and the void now yawns beneath, and some day the stately ,house disappears, and men hush their hearts and wring their hands over the terrible gap. Judas had perhaps the finest profession of the twelve apostles. So earnest, so firm and unfaltering his footstep in the now untried path, so devoted and
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