The mutual dependence of belief and life.
"Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh," etc. Religion is the strength and security of morality. Morality is the outcome and flower of religion. There must be some relation, therefore, between the truth of the religious belief and the purity and elevation of the moral life. A doctrine of God and things Divine which becomes mistaken, imperfect, or corrupt, cannot but affect the conduct which a man allows himself. A life of license is the natural result of a denial of God and Christ. Morals are imperiled and impaired as spiritual truth is scorned or depraved. The abuse of grace is the most fatal canker in the Church. The corruption of the best is the worst. The angel that falls becomes a devil. The grace of God, corrupted, is turned to lasciviousness. The liberty of the gospel, when perverted, becomes an occasion to the flesh. Humility is the true note of dignity. The highest natures are the most modest and self-restrained; the lowest and most ignorant, the rashest and the most self-willed. Reverence is the safeguard both of faith and of virtue. The latest developments of error and unbelief are no novelty. The corruptions of Jude's time were but the corruptions of ancient days. The evils which crept into the primitive Church of Christ were but the renewals of the "way of Cain," the "error of Balsam," the "gainsaying of Korah." Sin only repeats itself as it perpetuates itself. Under many new forms we recognize only the old sins of envy, avarice, and pride.
A perfect Church a vain expectation.
"These are spots in your feasts of charity," etc. The teaching of our Lord's great parables gives us no warrant to look for a perfect Church till the end. Popular ideas of the purity of the primitive Church are far from being borne out by fact. The New Testament writings themselves, especially the Epistles to the Corinthians, the Pastoral Epistles, Jude, 2 Peter, and the Apocalypse, indicate with the utmost plainness how mixed the early Churches were, and to what an extent they-suffered from grievous and varied evils. Neither have we any scriptural warrant for setting up impracticable terms of admission to the Christian Church, or impracticable conditions of discipline within it. The facility with which the most sacred usages and ordinances admit of abuse, e.g., the perversion of the simple and beautiful institution of the love-feasts, shows the necessity of jealous watchfulness over ecclesiastical practice, and the wisdom of denying ourselves the most appropriate forms for the expression of Christian life and worship, when these become misunderstood, lifeless, or associated with evil. The most fatal form of selfishness is the selfishness which takes advantage of religion, and assumes the cloak of spirituality. Mark Jude's lurid picture of the brood of deceits, sensualities, and blasphemies that spring from it. Study, too, his equally lurid picture of the degradation, the emptiness, the death-in-life of such a life—the treacherous hopes like rainless clouds with which it beguiles and embitters, the barrenness worse than that of exhausted autumnal trees to which it is doomed, the shame which is the issue of its passionate license.—There is a double punishment of fleshly sins. Their retribution comes in the penal law which works in nature and makes them in part their own avengers in time. It comes, too, in the nameless awards of eternity, which axe in reserve.