It's the same trap into which Christians have fallen since the days of the Upper Room. In the first century it was Simon Peter insisting that all male believers be circumcised. In the twentieth century, it was Pentecostal believers drawing up an elaborate list of rules to protect the church from creeping worldly influences. All too often zeal becomes hard. To keep zeal from becoming intolerant it must be tempered with compassion.
Zeal insists that it is always right.
Compassion is concerned only with knowing that God is right. Zeal succumbs to the seductive temptation of intellectualism and speaks above the heads of its listeners. Thomas Chalmers was one of Scotland's noted preachers of a century ago. For seven years he experienced a correctness, but a lack of spiritual life and power, the same lack of spiritual life and power which threatens God's Church in Russia today. Then something happened.