Page:Undenominationalism.djvu/12

8 is no such thing as purely negative teaching. Every negation contains an affirmation; and every omission implies a positive precept. You cannot, by any possibility, forbid the teaching of what is distinctive—which will include all creeds, catechisms, ministries, sacraments, church duties and privileges, and everything that belongs to Christian theology or experience—without thereby necessarily teaching, through the very prohibition, that insistence on these things may be amiable but must be untrue. You are not only teaching this but teaching it with a force the more irresistible because it is silent, and (as it were) automatic. You are teaching a fundamental habit of mind which the pupils whom you mould will never wholly forget. It is only, indeed, by a serious revolt against the whole principle of their own education that they will ever escape from its practical influence. Nor is the position that all denominations are really, in respect of their differences, more or less wrong, a position which makes in fact (as might superficially be supposed) in the direction of a general peace. It makes only towards general contempt for theological definiteness, a general lack of conviction, and superficiality both of character and of mind.

The fact is, that undenominationalism, so far from being really unsectarian in character, is itself an instance of the sectarian spirit in its most exclusive and aggressive form. It is really itself of the nature of an attempt at a new denomination, more latitudinarian and rationalistic in basis, more illiberal and persecuting in method, than any that before exists. It sins so flagrantly against the first principles of liberalism as actually to attempt the suppression by force of the liberty of every denomination other than itself. And the people are, for the moment, so infatuated with a music of soft phrases, as to applaud the attempt, and believe it to be a triumph of large-hearted liberality.