What They Said

“Our idea of the nature of earnest individual piety, must be taken, not from the conventional standard of the age, but from the Word of God. It is of immense importance to bear this in recollection, and to admit its truth. It must be so, whether we admit it or no. Once give up the Bible as the only true standard of personal religion, and there is no rule left but custom, which is ever varying with the opinions and corruptions of the times. On this principle, all but the very lowest stages of general apostasy might be justified, for even they were the conventional notions of their day. No, the Bible, the Bible alone, is the religion of Christians. "To the law and to the testimony; if they speak not, and act not, according to them, it is because there is no light in them." Yet how prevalent is the disposition to conform ourselves to the prevailing religion of the day and of the church to which we belong, and to satisfy ourselves with the average measure of piety around us. "I am as good as my neighbours," is the shield with which many a man repels the charge of deficiency. "I am as good as my fellow-members," is the self-same shield with which many a professor of religion wards off the allegation of his being below his duty. The very same conventionalism which ruins the world, corrupts the church. That which keeps down the standard of morality in the one, depresses the standard of piety in the other. This has been the fatal practical error of the church through every age of its existence, and by which its beauty has been disfigured, its power weakened, and its usefulness impeded: its members, instead of looking into the perfect law of Scripture, and seeing themselves reflected from that faithful mirror, and adjusting their character and conduct by its infallible revelations, have placed before themselves the glass of the Christian profession as it was found in the church of the day, and have regulated their behaviour by what they saw in the prevailing character of their fellow-Christians.”

John Angell James