The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1909-01-26
CHURCH FALSE TO CALLING.
 SAYS PARKHURST IN ADDRESS
Pulpit Prates of Iniquity Of Ahab and Jezebel While Modern Ahabs Ruin Youth Faster Than They Can be Baptized,
 He Declares.

Dr. Parkhurst in his address at the | Bridgeport Pastors banquet last night said that the church and the state can- not exist together without influencing each other. He thought it desirable that the church should keep in its own sphere, but should know it's sphere and ! occupy it completely. He was of the opinion that the church has hitherto laid too much stress on individual sal vation. Depravity he said is always sprig4ntly. Virtue grows weary after short race. He expressed a prefer ence for frank depravity, as against a hypocritical mingling of virtue and vice. He expressed profound admira- tion for Governor Hughes of New York. The address in full was as fol- lows:
 Two vitalized institutions, though they be as distinct as Church and State, cannot exist in contact without being mutually influential. Each wll tell upon the other. They may tell too much; they may tell too lttle; they may tell mistakenly; but they will tell And the question that I attempt to handle tonight is: To what extent,
 
 in the Church.-Construing that word generously-are authorized to exert a determining influence upon civic life.
 Keep in Proper Territory.
 Whatever my relation to the Church I have no ambition to see it's influence extended over territory that does not belong to 1t, but 1t is important to know what its proper territory is, and how much there is of it; and 1t is furthermore important to get indus tr:ously at work occupying that ter ritory, covering 1t with the best thoughts we know how to think and utter, and with the most discreet and vigorous activit. we know how to ex- ercise And 1t is interesting and en- couraging just at this point to record the fact that the tide of the best thought in our country is at the pres en time setting strongly in this direc- tion. A wave of moral appreciation is certainly sweeping across the ter ritory of civic concern.
 Politics and statecraft.
 Matters of politics and of statecraft. two very different things by the way, are being considered seriously, and tens of thousands of men in middle and later life are adopting local and national questions into the category of their Interests, and what com menced as mere spasmodic reform is evidently developing in the direction of permanent civic regenercy.
 Church -imid.
 What then can the church do? Do anything reasonable that it sets it's heart and hands to. The Church, am ashamed to say. is timid, and the or ganized political influences of the state encourage that timidity. It is so afraid oe doing what is not eccles- iastically proper, that 1t leaves undone a lot of tEiE -s that it is enthusiastically wicked for it to neglect, and has grown more or less oblivious of the time when under the Hebrew theo- cracy the Church was the state prophets the law givers and states men and civic administration recog- nized as leaning back directly upon the throne of God. am not pleading for revival of the old Hebrew theo- cracy but Gods throne has got to be brought into the business somehow and not expediency but righteousness, made the central column around which the social structure shall clus- ter.
 DispropOrtiOnate Emphasis.
 The Church through it's ministerial representatives has. in my judgment, laid an awkward and disproportionate
  dividuals, fo- -etting that in Johns vision of the "City come down from God" is taught the truth that the final destiny of the race is to find it's consummation in a redeem ed commonv'eaI h, not in @ dis iniegrated mob of converted indi- vidualities, and that when Christ talks about the kingdom of heaven he is thinking of the reconstruction of So- NiRfv- a v1ajS a1 a r7a crowd of men and women separately labeled for transportation to realm unknown. There is sense undoubt- edly in which souls have to be saved one at time, but even so an indivi- dual is merely a vulgar fraction till he is gathered in with his fellows to form a combined whole.
 Church View of Earth.
 "And tke Church is not only timid, but makes so much more of religion considered as means of enjoying heav- en bye and bye and it does of making the earth heavenly to-day, that it thinks of this world rather as a place to get out of, than as a place to re- main in with a view to making 1t so pleasant that one would not care to get out of it at all. It has always seemed to me that the fact stated in Scripture that Christ spent the inter- val between his death and his resur- rection in the attempt to improve the condition of the underworld, ought to be taken by us as an indication that there is nothing so bad as not to be redeemable, that in whatever place we are put it is selfish and cowardly to regard 1t as point of escape, and that it is a mean kind of evasion in any man when his first thought in re- gard to the spot he is just now occupy ing is that it offers means of access to another spot that he likes better and that is more comfortable.
 Depravity Sprightly.
 rAnd then there is this other sing ular thing about good people, that so many of us,-if we call ourselves such lack of staying power. Depravity is always sprightly, never gets discouraged, never becomes worried and tired and lies by to re- cuperate. A wicked man grown old in wickeCness VII do a bad thing in as fresh and enthusiastic way as though it were his first attempt at it. It wears fascinating aspect of spontaneity. Misbehavior is so ad- mirab done as to discourage criti- cism. We cannot help admiring genius whatever it's owner uses it for. Virtue on the contrary wears of ten that appearance of modesty that leads one to imagine it has not become ita tn m