II. The "Church of the Future" is a church of stability in principle and flexibility in operation.
The work of the church of God upon the earth is to teach and govern men. The truth, by which alone the intellect can be enlightened, the law, by which alone the heart and life can be subjected to the will of God, are both entrusted to her keeping. Doctrine informing and directing discipline, discipline realizing and preserving doctrine--such is the system by which her Lord commanded her to subdue the world, and by which to this day the world has been subdued.
The people whose church the "Church of the Future" is to be, and of whom, as its members, it must be composed, will be a _free_ people. The race from which they spring long ago recognized, as fundamental truth, that the will of the people is the highest law, and every civil and political institution which is or is to be derives its origin and permanence from the sole fiat of the citizen. There is no power above it by which its errors may be corrected or its excesses be restrained. { 156} The popular vote is the tribunal from whose decision there can be no appeal. The ballot-box is the throne of state, from which supreme authority comes down only to take up the thunderbolts of war.
The sturdy independence which results from such a national cultivation will place a burden of no common order upon the church into whose hands the control and unification of American society must fall. The bearer of divine illumination, the custodian of unalterable truth, the spiritual government of the people, will be also on her shoulders; and she must be able to withstand not only persecution from without, but the more dangerous assaults of innovation and revolt within. She must have _no capacity for compromise_. The organic principle which binds into one body her integral elements must be beyond the power of popular tumult to disturb or political dissensions to destroy. In every storm and tempest she must be immovable, and, with a will of divine firmness and an arm of godlike might, must bend the tempest and control the storm.
Again, the people over whom the "Church of the Future" will extend its sway embraces men of every nation, color, class, and tongue. The offspring of the African, the Saxon, and the Indian dwell here together with the children of the Hebrew, the Mongolian, the Teuton, and the Celt. Religions of all forms offer contemporaneous and discordant worship to their several divinities. Prejudices of every complexion and against every truth mingle in the religious atmosphere. Vices of every name, grown, through long apathy or longer ignorance, into a second nature, contaminate the public heart. Every possible diversity of ideas, of tastes, of impossibilities, is found among them, and, under all, the same great wants, the same unceasing aspirations, the same formless void.