Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 July 1877 — Christian Associations. [ARTICLE]

Christian Associations.

These great national and international gatherings ot the disciples of Christ, regarded from every point of view, are entitled to our full and cordial admiration. They furnish one of the most hopeful signs ot tbe times in which we live. They do inculcate good, not only because of the special religious influences exerted in the several localities where th«y meet from year to year, but because of that new and powerful demonstration of the essential truth of the Gospel, and tiro spiritual oneness of all Christ’s followers, which thev are more and more exhibiting to the world. The people of the world have long clamored for this demonstration, have long demanded, in incredulity, this sign from Heaven. They have turned away from our several denominational churches, saying, You are divided, you are exclusive, you are sectarian, you are cold, and formal and aristocratic. Well, in these Christian Associations, constituted, as they are. of the most active and intelligent members of all the great evangelical churches, and held together by the attractive power of a common salvation, that old objection is met and answered. The challenge of the unbelieving world is accepted, and the Church, acting through her own sons in those Evangelical Alliances and Christian Associations, shows herself not only ready, but eager, to overleap all the narrow inclosures of dehomiuaticnal interests, and

carry the Gospel through the streets and lanes of every city, until every perishing soul receives its glad tidings. Is this the sort of Christianity that the world wants and has so often demanded ? This is precisely the style of Christianity embodied in the Young Men’s Christian Association. In other words, tills is the essential Christianity which the whole Church of Jesus Christ is now giving to tlie world through the agency, not merely of her regularly-ordained ministers, but especially through her young men, her consecrated women, her lay evangelists, her Sabbath-School workers, her "heroic missionaries of eveiy name and every order, who have at last resolved, in Christ’s strength, that if the world will not come to the Church for salvation, they will carry both the Church and salvation to the world. This is the spirit in which the Young Men’s Christian Association had its origin more than twenty years ago. In this spirit it has worked its way into the cordial confidence and admiration of every evangelical church hi Christendom, and even to the favor of the world itself. The Church of our times present* no sublimer aspect to the world than that exhibited in these Young Men’s and other similar Associations. It is the attitude of earnest endeavor to fulfill the Savior’s last great command to preach the gospel to every creature. It is the attitude of earnest desire to realize the fruition of His intercessory prayer,that “Ye all may be one,” and to obey His new commandment that “ye love one another.” — Interior.