take up a hostile attitude to everything not distinctly and avowedly
Christian, as though any other position were a treachery to his cause,
and a surrender of his exclusive right to the authorship of all the good
which is in the world. In this temper we may dwell only on the guilt and
misery and defilements, the wounds and bruises and putrefying sores of
the heathen world; or if aught better is brought under our eye, we may
look askant and suspiciously upon it, as though all recognition of it
were a disparagement of something better. And so we may come to regard
the fairest deeds of unbaptized men as only more splendid sins. We may
have a short but decisive formula by which to try and by which to
condemn them. These deeds, we may say, were not of faith, and therefore
they could not please God; the men that wrought them knew not Christ,
and therefore their work was worthless--hay, straw, and stubble, to be
utterly burned up in the day of the trial of every man's work.

"Yet there is indeed a certain narrowness of view, out of which alone
the language of so sweeping a condemnation could proceed. Our allegiance
to Christ, as the one fountain of light and life for the world, demands
that we affirm none to be good but Him, allow no goodness save that
which has proceeded from Him; but it does not demand that we deny
goodness, because of the place where we find it, because we meet it, a
garden tree, in the wilderness. It only requires that we claim this for
Him who planted, and was willing that it should grow there; whom it
would itself have gladly owned as its author, if, belonging to a happier
time, it could have known Him by his name, whom in part it knew by his
power.

"We do not make much of a light of nature when we admit a righteousness
in those to whom in the days of their flesh the Gospel had not come. We
only affirm that the Word, though not as yet dwelling among us, yet