While I believed this, (which, however disagreeable to modern Christians, is the clear doctrine of the New Testament,) I acted an eccentric and unprofitable part.  From it I was saved against my will, and forced into a course in which the doctrine, having been laid to sleep, awoke only now and then to reproach and harass me for my unfaithfulness to it.  This doctrine it is, which makes so many spiritual persons lend active or passive aid to uphold abuses and perpetuate mischief in every department of human life.  Those who stick closest to the Scripture do not shrink from saying, that “it is not worth while trying to mend the world,” and stigmatize as “political and worldly” such as pursue an opposite course.  Undoubtedly, if we are to expect our Master at cockcrowing, we shall not study the permanent improvement of this transitory scene.  To teach the certain speedy destruction of earthly things, as the New Testament does, is to cut the sinews of all earthly progress; to declare war against Intellect and Imagination, against Industrial and Social advancement.

There was a time when I was distressed at being unable to avoid exultation in the worldly greatness of England.  My heart would, in spite, of me, swell with something of pride, when a Turk or Arab asked what was my country:  I then used to confess to God this pride as a sin.  I still see that that was a legitimate deduction from the Scripture.  “The glory of this world passeth away,” and I had professed to be “dead with Christ” to it.  The difference is this.  I am now as “dead” as then to all of it which my conscience discerns to be sinful, but I have not to torment myself in a (fundamentally ascetic) struggle against innocent and healthy impulses.  I now, with deliberate approval, “love the world and the things of the world.”  I can feel patriotism, and take the deepest interest in the future prospects of nations, and no longer reproach myself.  Yet this is quite consistent with feeling the spiritual interests of men to be of all incomparably the highest.

Modern religionists profess to be disciples of Christ, and talk high of the perfect morality of the New Testament, when they certainly do not submit their understanding to it, and are no more like to the first disciples than bishops are like the pennyless apostles.  One critic tells me that I know that the above is not the true interpretation of the apostolic doctrine.  Assuredly I am aware that we may rebuke “the world” and “worldliness,” in a legitimate and modified sense, as being the system of selfishness:  true,—­and I have avowed this in another work; but it does not follow that Jesus and the apostles did not go farther:  and manifestly they did.  The true disciple, who would be perfect as his Master, was indeed ordered to sell all, give to the poor and follow him; and when that severity was relaxed by good sense, it was still taught that things which lasted to the other side of the grave alone deserved our affection or our exertion.  If any person thinks me ignorant of the Scriptures for being of this judgment, let him so think; but to deny that I am sincere in my avowal, is a very needless insolence.