Secondly, churches organized upon elective affinities of men are contrary to the spirit of the gospel.  We may associate with men who are of like taste with ours.  We have that privilege.  If men are knowledgeable and intellectual, there is no sin in their choosing for intimate companions and associates men of like pursuits and like intellectual qualities.  That is right.  If men are rich, there is no reason why men who hold like property should not confer with each other, and form interests and friendships together.  If men are refined, if they have become aesthetic, there is no reason why they should not associate in the realm of beauty, artists with artists, nor why the great enjoyers of beauty should not be in sympathy.  Exit all these are not to be allowed to do it at the price of abandoning common humanity; you have no right to make your nest in the boughs of knowledge, and let all the rest of the world go as it will.  You have no right to make your home among those who are polished and exquisite and fastidious in their tastes, whose garments are beauty, whose house is a temple of art, and all whose associations are of like kind, and neglect common humanity.  You have no right to shut yourself up in a limited company of those who are like you in these directions, and let all the rest of men go without sympathy and without care.  It is a right thing for a man to salute his neighbor who salutes him; but if you salute those who salute you, says Christ, what thank have ye—­do not even the publicans so?  It is no sin that a man, being intellectual in his nature, should like intellectual people, and gratify that which is divine and God-like in him; but if, because he likes intellectual people, he loses all interest in ignorant people, it convicts him of depravity and of moral perversion.  When this is carried out to such an extent that churches are organized upon sharp classification, upon elective affinities, they not only cease to be Christian churches, but they are heretical; not perhaps in doctrine, but worse than that, heretical in heart.

The fact is that a church needs poor men and wicked men as much as it does pure men and virtuous men and pious men.  What man needs is familiarity with universal human nature.  He needs never to separate himself from men in daily life.  It is not necessary that in our houses we should bring pestilential diseases or pestilential examples, but somehow we must hold on to men if they are wicked; somehow the circulation between the top and the bottom must be carried on; somehow there must be an atoning power in the heart of every true believer of the Lord Jesus Christ who shall say, looking out and seeing that the world is lost, and is living in sin and misery, “I belong to it, and it belongs to me.”  When you take the loaf of society and cut off the upper crust, slicing it horizontally, you get an elect church.  Yes, it is the peculiarly elect church of selfishness.  But you should cut the loaf of society from the top down to the bottom, and take in something of everything.  True, every church would be very much edified and advantaged if it had in it scholarly men, knowledgeable men; but the church is strong in proportion as it has in it something of everything, from the very top to the very bottom.