To this appeal men often make reply:  “We can not break loose from our religious surroundings, dear to us through life-long and most tender associations.”  But, my friends, this objection can have no weight with this audience, assembled here on this glorious Lord’s day, and on this our first religious meeting.  Here we have already broken loose from these associations.  These ties, how dear so ever to us, we have already sundered.  The people with whom we once met, and with whom we once took sweet counsel, the churches in which we once worshiped, shall know us no more forever.  Here we are free to act, and to correct the mistakes that have been unwittingly made by the churches with which we have formerly been connected, just as our American fathers were free to frame a better government than the government of the nations out of which they came.

May I not appeal to you, my friends, and say you owe it to yourselves, you owe it to Christians in every land, you owe it to your Lord, you owe it to the future State of Kansas, to so act as to free the Christian profession from the trammels that have hindered its progress and glory ever since the days when our divisions began.  If Protestantism seas done so much in spite of all its divisions, what will it not do if these hindrances are taken out of the way?

Kansas is certainly predestinated to be a great State.  The fertility of its soil, the healthfulness of its atmosphere, and the fact that its population is to be made up from the bravest, most daring and most enterprising men in the nation, all look in this direction; you ought, then, my friends, to see to it that as far as your influence may go its religion shall be nothing less than primitive and apostolic Christianity.

In ascertaining what is primitive and apostolic Christianity, we shall pay supreme respect to the time when the old or Jewish dispensation came to an end, and when the new or Christian dispensation began.  The first, or Jewish dispensation, Jesus took out of the way, nailing it to the cross.  The second, or Christian dispensation, began after Jesus arose from the dead and ascended up on high, far above the thrones, dominions, principalities and powers of the world of light, and became the Head over all things to the church.  This was the proposition with which Peter closed his sermon on the day of Pentecost:  “Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.”  To this agree the words of Jesus after his resurrection, as recorded in the close of Matthew’s gospel:  “All authority is given to me in heaven and in earth.  Go ye, therefore, and disciple all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”