y touched in or out of the
pulpit. There is something which begins with only an acquaintance, but
it readily grows into more, and that more is supplied at a heavy cost
to the individual and to the community.

In a well-known passage in one of his letters, St. Paul asks: "What
concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth
with an infidel? Wherefore come out from among them, saith the Lord,
and be ye separate; touch not the unclean thing." Both the question
and the admonition apply to personal friendships and to other
relationships, such as marriage, social and business intercourse. But
it has another and wider application. They refer to the general
attitude of our thought, our bearing towards interests and people whom
we have reason to believe are hurtful themselves and represent hurtful
institutions. For me to call myself a Christian, and yet be on terms
of apparent friendship, of easy good nature and tolerance of men and
things that stand for Belial, that are Belial, is one of the most
effective ways I know of crucifying Christ afresh, and putting Him to
open shame. Whatever the King of Israel might think of his company,
the fact that he was in it gave to their worthlessness a new tenure of
existence and to their wickedness an added licence. He did not make
them better men, but they made him a worse man. And for us to appear
to countenance wrong things, so as to favour an impression that
possibly they are not so wrong after all; to strengthen the wickedness
which would hide itself behind the sinister expression, that the "devil
may not be so bad as he is painted," is to be on the side of the devil.
It is to hearten the foes of good and perplex and discourage the
enemies of evil.

In that remarkable book, _Mark Rutherford's Deliverance_, the writer
speaks of a day when politics will become a matter of life or death,
dividing men with really private love and hate. "I have heard it
said," he tells us, "that we ought to congratulate ourselves that
political differences do not in this country breed personal
animosities. To me this seems anything but a subject of
congratulation. Men who are totally at variance ought not to be
friends, and if Radical and Tory are not totally but merely
superficially at variance, so much the worse for their Radicalism and
Toryism. Most of us," he goes on to say, "have no real loves and no
real hatreds. Blessed is love, less blessed is hatred, but thrice