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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 77

Not on Negations of Doctrine

Not on Negations of Doctrine.

Union meanwhile, then, will never come by negations merely, for this is to pour out the wine by stripping your Creed to the lowest terms, so as to include everybody on what is the lowest common ground; for this were to reject Christ as Absolute King and Head of the Church, whose teaching is intelligible and whose Word is law, and place on His throne a limited monarch, or president, elected by popular show of hands. And, be it remembered, that if He prayed for unity. He also prayed that His people might be sanctified through the truth. That being so, they cannot have too much of it it is by this process of reducing your Creed to its lowest terms, to the level of the man in the street, that all distinctively Christian truth has vanished from your public education. To be sure, we are commanded by the Apostle of the Gentiles to "receive him that is weak in the faith"; and this we shall do; but that is another thing from "receiving" also his "weak" faith. If he has not attained to a like precious faith with us, we are not going, if he is "weak" in his theological upper storey, to make his weakness the measure of the truth to which we have been permitted to attain. And the same Apostle's inspired counsel is: "Whereto we have already attained, by that same rule, let us walk." Has it not been said of certain German divines that they escaped the shipwreck of faith "only in their shirts"? At the rate we are going, and in the direction we are asked to move, I doubt whether our shirts will be left to us, and whether we shall not be found, within a year or two, hid among the trees of the garden, in the primitive theological nakedness of natural religion. But, brethren, we shall not throw away our theological wineskins, lest we, with unskilled hands, spill the precious wine; we shall keep our theological garments, four of them it may be said, as of those garments of God's people in the wilderness, after forty years' wear and tear: "Your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy feet." This is more than can be said of the "working faith," the "working clothes," of our new theological doctors. These never suffer from age at all events; why should they, when Germany can turn out new "fashions" every decade?