Diplomacies in church government and adjustments in church creeds can wait on this consecration, this baptism of unction.  I never heard that the statesman who formulated the peace at Paris in 1815 got in the way of the Household Brigades and the Highlanders at Waterloo and Hougomont.  They played their commendable game, but they could not have swept that awful slope of flame in which Ney and the Old Guard staggered on at Mont St. Jean.

Let us redeem our creeds at the front, and prove the welding of our weapons and their tempered blades upon every evil way and darkness and superstition that afflict humankind.

And have you not seen with moistened eyes and beating hearts the pathetic surgings of harassed and broken sons and daughters of God toward His son Jesus Christ?  I have watched them until I felt constrained to cry aloud and spare not; and while viewing them here and yonder, and refusing to be localized in our love toward them, have not our spirits been rebuked, have they not known fear for ourselves, have they not pensively echoed the charge of some that we have no real roots in democracy, but are as plants in pots, and not as oaks in the soil of earth?  If independency is a barrier to the essence of which it is supposedly a form, if superiority shuts us off from assimilation with popular movements and delivers us over to cliques, then these churches of ours[1] will end in a record of shame and confusion.  While we are busy in trivial things, our energy and our might will be deflected, and the living God will hand over the crusade to those who have proven worthier and who knew the day when it did come, even the day of their visitation.

[Footnote 1:  The special reference is to the Congregational churches.]

We must arise with courage undismayed, and join in the cry of the ages: 

  When wilt thou save the people,
    O God of mercy, when? 
  The people!  Lord, the people! 
    Not crowns, nor thrones, but men.

  Flower of thy heart, O Lord, are they,
  Their heritage a sunless day. 
  Let them like weeds not fade away;
    Lord, save the people.

If our hearts are thus enlarged, we shall run in the way of His commandments; fatherhood and brotherhood and sonship will not be symbols, shibboleths of pious intercourse, but ways of God’s reaching out through us for the total brotherhood.  We shall silence the caviler against missions; we shall raise the negro in the face of those who say he can not be raised; we shall see the latter-day miracles, and the lame man healed and rejoicing at the Temple gate.  Thus may the breath of God sweep across our pastorates and dismiss timidity, provincialism, ease, and narrowness of outlook.  And thus may the power be demonstrated as of heaven because it is the power unto salvation.  Let us fear not men who shall die, nor be content to fill our peaceful lot and occupy a respectable grave.  The new world needs the renewed baptism, and the “modernism” of which medievalists complain is the robe of honor for the Christ of this epoch.  So that there shall come unto the Church the flame of sacred love, and, kindling on every heart and altar, there shall it burn for the glory of Christ, the High Priest, with inextinguishable blaze.  We can rest content, for, behold! the day cometh and in its light.  Let us go hence.