236 IN FASHION OR IN FAVOUR
3. It is evident that the world of to-day has changed, and it is unreasonable to require of modern Christians the line of action which was necessary in the first century. The spirit of Christ has counted for something during nineteen centuries, and Western society is not arrayed in arrogant hostility to the claims and ethics of our Master. His disciples are neither persecuted nor seduced after the fashion of the former days, and it is not neces- isary to preach that separation which once was compulsory, or to warn against the gross temptations which once beset the disciple from street and temple, from book and Art. Keligious writers have shown a want of historical insight in adopting those iiery denunciations of the world which applied to the Corinth of St. Paul and the Eome of Juvenal. But this does not mean that there is no anti-Christian world or that Christians have not need to watch and pray ; it only means that war has changed its form, and instead of the clash of swords we have the unseen danger of the rifle. We have to get to the principle which underlies all forms, and what constitutes the world in every age is devotion to the material instead of to the spiritual.
^ Preachers may talk with airy rhetoric about the distinction between the Church and the World ; but we feel, somehow, that the lines of division tend to melt away before our eyes. We cannot draw sharp lines of separation. Men may try, they have often tried, to do so in one way or another. They may wear, like Quakers, a peculiar dress, or they may ticket certain forms of amusement as " worldly," or they may use a peculiar phraseology ; but experience tells us how ludicrous and disastrous such attempts have been, to what hypocrisies and absurdities they lead. The very expression, common enough once, still occasionally appears in newspapers, the " religious world " — how unreal it sounds ! No, if we are to choose between the " religious world " and the " world " without a prefix, we must frankly prefer the latter.^
4. A man does not cease to be unworldly by adopting a ritual of renunciation any more than a Bushman becomes a European by washing off his grease and ochre, and attiring himself in clean linen and broadcloth. The casual gossip of the cloister may show that society and the petty interests of the butterfly crowd loom as large as ever in the imagination of its inmates. The uncon- scious leanings of an evangelical home ruled by the straitest
1 H. R. Gamble,
ROMANS XII. 2 237
maxims may show that the silly, senseless world finds a tell-tale mirror there. The trivialities of life, upon which the back has been ostensibly turned, cling like burrs to the textures of the inner man. Honest unworldliness is central to a man's scheme of thought, and begins far down below the surface. We cannot bind it upon men by artificial precepts.
^ Are saints to be distinguished as men and women to whom everyday concerns ofier no sort of attraction ? Is their attitude towards civilization, and art, and business, and amusement that of unconcern or even of disdain ? Are they to be recognized by differences of dress, or manner of speaking, from others around them ? If so, Brother Lawrence in his kitchen, and Santa Zita going about her work as a housemaid, and even St. Paul weaving cloth for his tents, cannot properly be described as saints.^
(1) If any one is indulging in what the Prayer-Book calk " notorious sin," i.e. sin of which no Christian can doubt that it is serious and deadly sin ; if he is a scorner of God, or of his parents, a blasphemer, a fornicator, a thief, a slanderer, a liar; he must know at once, without further question, that he is "fashioned according to this world."
^ A story is told of Dr. Guthrie, that, finding a little girl weeping in great distress in Edinburgh, he, pitying her, asked the reason, and discovered that she had lost sixpence. The Doctor not only supplied the money, but took the child to a baker, not far from the spot, to buy a loaf for her. "That little girl," said the baker, " seems always to be losing sixpences. Doctor; perhaps it is her trade." And so it was. The poor little lassie had been brought up in a "padding ken," or a "fencing crib," a school for young thieves; and her peculiar vocation was to take her walks abroad, drop a pretended six- pence, and burst into uncontrollable weeping. The best of the story is that Doctor Guthrie, bending down, told the child that she was now more than ever an object of pity, since she earned her living by sin, and, finding out where she dwelt, he rescued her from her terrible position.^
(2) But, apart from open or notorious sin, if a man's heart is so set upon anything here in this present life that the thought of the world to come is unpleasant and u'ksome to him, he may be said to be fashioned according to this world. "When a man is
^ A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 106. • J. H. Friswell, This Wicked World, 14.