Modernism discloses its true character and reveals its inherently unethical nature by its methods of propagation. It is a cuckoo that never builds a nest for itself but propagates its kind by laying its eggs in the nest of some clean bird. Modernism builds few churches. It establishes few schools. It is a parasite which feeds upon the life of another and destroys the life upon which it feeds. Everywhere the story is the same. Preachers and professors of the modernist school, apparently without any compunction of conscience, not only accept, but seek positions in evangelical institutions, and while deriving their support from those institutions, use their positions to destroy the faith which those institutions were founded to defend. And in justification of this utterly unethical course, they tell us that they do not believe in "the rule of the dead hand."

In years gone by, men of faith and of a good conscience, by faithful industry accumulated large wealth, and as an expression of their devotion to the Saviour Who died for them, they willed that the product of their life should, in perpetuity, be used for the propagation of the faith by which they have had found salvation. The trust thus solemnly conveyed was accepted, and for time its terms were respected; but now a generation has arisen which claims the right, not like Paul, to preach the faith which once he destroyed, but to use these endowments to destroy the faith which they were given to teach.

Let me remind you of a most interesting story in the Old Testament representing the sacredness of covenants solemnly agreed upon. When Joshua entered the Promised Land and God gave him victory over the people of the land, in the course of his triumphant progress, he was met with a certain company of people who declared that they had come to meet him "from a very far country." They explained to him that the bread which they carried and which was now moldy they had taken hot from the ovens; that their bottles of wine were new when they started; and that their garments and their shoes had become old "by reason of the very long journey." Thus they came proposing that Joshua should make a covenant with them, and as he supposed they lived in a very remote part of the country, he made a covenant with them "to let them live."

Scarcely had the league been ratified, however, when he discovered that they came from Gibeon in their immediate neighborhood; but because he had made a covenant, Joshua held himself in honour bound to respect its terms, and the Gibeonites were permitted to live. Centuries later, "There was a famine in the days of David three years, year after year, and David inquired of the Lord. And the Lord answered, It is Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites." Thus because Saul disregarded what the modernists would call "the rule of the dead hand," all nature cried aloud in protest, and the earth refused to yield her fruit, the heavens their rain and dew, for three years, year by year, all because the covenant was broken.

But the modernists protest is not really against "the rule of the dead hand;" its objections is the rule of the hand of the Living Christ. Again, the unethical nature of this thing we call modernism is shown by the fact that it does not even speak its own language, but steals the terminology of orthodoxy; and with all the cunning of the Jesuit, reads into evangelical speech a content which is the very opposite of its evangelical significance. Modernism wears the clothes of a sheep, and when it suits its purpose can simulate the actions of the sheep; but beneath its apparently harmless disguise, there is ever to be found the bloody and murderous nature of the wolf.

Furthermore, modernism, as I have observed it, is aggressive in every sphere of religious activity. Not content with capturing individual pulpits and individual university chairs and individual educational institutions, it seeks by methods worthy of the politics of a Tammany Hall, to obtain control of all denominational organizations, of mission boards, of Sunday School boards, and publication boards, and thus to use the machinery of the denomination in which it operates to disseminate its own poison.