Dawson Collection

There was another line of cleavage. It would be rash to assert that the earlier Evangelicals held that religion had nothing to do with conduct; but the tendency of the school, among its later adherents, was to lay stress on the negative, rather than on the positive side of the principle. If a man did not dance, did not play cards or billiards, did not go to the theatre, did not read plays or novels, he was accounted a religious man. If he did any of these things, he was set down as a worldly man. Dawson made short work of these artificial distinctions and of the ingenious compromises that grew out of them. To his mind, what a man did was far more important than what he abstained from doing. '' What doest thou more? " is the question that we have to answer—not " What doest thou less? " of prohibition—the law "Thou shalt not"—inits minutest details, and yet be far from the kingdom of heaven; for true unworldliness is not of the letter, but of the spirit. He would have accepted, without reserve, the definition of unworldliness that some of you may have read elsewhere; " Unworldliness does not consist in the most rigid and conscientious observance of any external rules of conduct, but in the spirit and temper, and in the habit of living created by the vision of God, by constant fellowship with Him, by a personal and vivid experience of the greatness of the Christian redemption, and by the settled purpose to do the will of God always, in all things, and at all times." That was the substance of Dawson's own teaching A man might obey the law from the very first. But when he began his ministry, the men and women who had been

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