266 THE REV. H. J. R. MARSTON, M.A., ON 
Then when you take the New Testament idea of the Church, how 
are you going to get the State to adopt that idea, and to act on that 
idea? If youhad a Churchand a State that were conterminous and 
coincident, then you might do it, but at the present time you have 
not. You have a State which consists of a majority of people that 
are not really in the Church of the New Testament at all. 
Consequently there arises your difficulty. You have tutors, teachers 
of various ranks in all our schools that are not in the Church of the 
New Testament. They may be registered as Christians because they 
are not Mohammedans or belonging to some other heathen body. 
But they are not members of the Church of Christ of the New 
Testament. They are not regenerated. The consequence is, you 
cannot at the present time carry out your ideals either in the Church 
or the State. What you have therefore to do is to aim at something 
that is practical. The State must always be below the Church until 
the millennium comes, or until the new heavens and the new earth, 
wherein dwelleth righteousness. At present you cannot bring the 
State up to the level of the Church. The consequence is the Church 
has to a large extent—and I am speaking of the Church of the New 
Testament, not any organic body—to pursue its course alone, and 
sometimes in antagonism indeed to the State, or rather, the State is 
in antagonism to the Church. Our educational system then, it seems 
to me, must be brought down to a practical level, and what is that 
practical level? Well, to endeavour to make men good citizens in 
the ordinary and common and lower sense of the term, and leave 
the Church to permeate the State, as the leaven did the 
mass of the meal which the woman inserted into it in the 
parable. 
If therefore, we aim at making men good citizens, instructing 
them in their childhood sufficiently for every child to have an 
opportunity to rise and to exercise whatever special faculty he may 
have, it seems to me that at the present time is the most that we can 
aim at. The State! Why, the State is not yet in its legislation up 
to the level of the Ten Commandments. If you look into our 
Statute Book you will see that there are acts and deeds permitted 
by our statutory law that would be condemned by the Decalogue ; 
and if the Statute Book is not up to the level of the Ten 
Commandments, how can you bring the legislation of the State up to 
the level of the regenerated Christian Church? So that we are at 
ee ee ae a ee 
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