The Religious Magazine and Monthly Review Volume 48 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: UNION IN DIVERSITY. A SERMON PREACHED BEFORE THE CONVENTION OF CONGREGATIONAL MINISTERS, MAT 30, 1872, BY A. P. PEABODY. " That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may know that thou hast sent me." ? John xvii. 21. Brethren, you have a right on this occasion to expect that the lamp of the sanctuary be fed with beaten oil. But in the failure of the provision that you made to ensure this, I was summoned to your service at so very late an hour, that I could only pass once through the press such few withered olive-berries as remained over at the close of the spring from the autumnal harvest. I will therefore speak to you as I can, not as I gladly would. This Convention, as a body, may be kept together by the material interests of which it is the trustee and the almoner. But ought it to have, shall it have a soul? Are there religious, spiritual, Christian reasons for its continued existence ? Has it any heart-bonds that may, if recognized, sustain a Christian kindred among its members ? If not, the body is to all intents dead, and it would be better to bury it out of sight, as soon as it can be decently done. But if there be in it the breath of life, it is time that its lagging pulse be stimulated, its languid respiration quickened, its attenuated frame clothed anew with flesh and sinews. That the old union as to religious belief will be restored we cannot anticipate, nor could any reasonable man hope for it; for the union, did it exist, would be one of apathy and indifference. I believe that a candid study of the times in the last and early in the present century, when the members of this Convention were said to be of one mind, would rather show that they were of no mind, ? that the momentous t...