judgment that is applied to you. Many well-meaning Christian people,
by an injudicious use of Christian phraseology in the wrong place,
and by the glaring contradiction between their prayers and their
talks and their daily life, bring down a great deal of deserved
hostility upon themselves and of discredit upon Christianity; and
then they comfort themselves and say they are bearing the 'reproach
of the Cross.' Not a bit of it! They are bearing the natural results
of their own failings and faults. And it is for us to see to it that
what provokes, if it does provoke, hostile judgments and uncharitable
criticisms, insulting speeches and sarcasms, and the sense of our
belonging to another regiment and having other objects, is our
cleaving to Jesus Christ, and not the imperfections and the sins with
which we so often spoil that cleaving. Be you careful for this, that
it is Christ in you that men turn from, and not you yourself and your
weakness and sin.

Meet this antagonism by not dropping your standard one inch. Keep the
flag right at the masthead. If you begin to haul it down, where are
you going to stop? Nowhere, until you have got it draggling in the
mud at the foot. It is of no use to try to conciliate by compromise.
All that we shall gain by that will be, as I have said, indifference
and contempt; all that we shall gain will be a loss to the cause. A
great deal is said in this day, and many efforts are being made--I
cannot but think mistaken efforts--by Christian people to bridge over
this gulf in the wrong way--that is, by trying to make out that
Christianity in its fundamental principles does approximate a great
deal more closely to the things that the world goes by than it really
does. It is all vain, and the only issue of it will be that we shall
have a decaying Christianity and a dying spiritual life. Keep the
flag up; emphasise and accentuate the things that the world