University of Virginia Library

XXXIV
AT THE CONSECRATION OF GRACE MEMORIAL
REFORMED CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
JUNE 7, 1903

I shall ask your attention to three lines of the Dedication
Canticle: "Serve the Lord with gladness: enter into
His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with
praise. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or
who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean
hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul
unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

Better lines could surely not be brought into any
dedication service of a church; and it is a happy thing
that we should have repeated them this morning. This
church is consecrated to the service of the Lord; and we
can serve Him by the way we serve our fellow-men.
This church is consecrated to service and duty. It was
written of old that "By their fruits ye shall know them";
and we can show the faith that is in us, we can show the
sincerity of our devotion, by the fruits we bring forth.
The man who is not a tender and considerate husband, a
loving and wise father, is not serving the Lord when he
goes to church; so with the woman; so with all who
come here. Our being in this church, our communion
here with one another, our sitting under the pastor and
hearing from him the Word of God, must, if we are sincere,
show the effects in our lives outside. We of the
Dutch and German Reformed Churches, like our brethren

of the Lutheran Church, have a peculiar duty to perform
in this great country of ours, a country still in the making,
for we have the duty peculiarly incumbent upon us
to take care of our brethren who come each year from
overseas to our shores. The man going to a new country
is torn by the roots from all his old associations, and
there is great danger to him in the time before he gets
his roots down into the new country, before he brings
himself into touch with his fellows in the new land. For
that reason I always take a peculiar interest in the attitude
of our churches toward the immigrants who come to
these shores. I feel that we should be peculiarly watchful
over them, because of our own history, because we
or our fathers came here under like conditions. Now
that we have established ourselves let us see to it that we
stretch out the hand of help, the hand of brotherhood, toward
the new-comers, and help them as speedily as possible
to get into such relations that it will be easy for
them to walk well in the new life. We are not to be excused
if we selfishly sit down and enjoy gifts that have
been given to us and do not try to share them with our
poorer fellows coming from every part of the world, who,
many of them, stand in such need of the helping hand;
who often not only meet too many people anxious to associate
with them for their detriment, but often too few
anxious to associate with them for their good.

I trust that with the consecration of each new church
of the Reformed creed in this our country there will be
established a fresh centre of effort to get at and to help
for their good the people that yearly come from overseas
to us. No more important work can be done by our
people; important to the cause of Christianity, important
to the cause of true national life and greatness here in our
own land.

Another thing: let us, so far as strength is given us,
make it evident to those who look on and who are not of

us that our faith is not one of words merely; that it finds
expression in deeds. One sad, one lamentable phase of
human history is that the very loftiest words, implying
the loftiest ideas, have often been used as cloaks for the
commission of dreadful deeds of iniquity. No more
hideous crimes have ever been committed by men than
those that have been committed in the name of liberty,
of order, of brotherhood, of religion. People have butchered
one another under circumstances of dreadful atrocity,
claiming all the time to be serving the object of the
brotherhood of man or of the fatherhood of God. We
must in our lives, in our efforts, endeavor to further the
cause of brotherhood in the human family; and we must
do it in such a way that the men anxious to find subject
for complaint or derision in the churches of the United
States, in our Church, may not be able to find it by
pointing out any contrast between our professions and
our lives.

This church is consecrated to-day to duty and to service,
to the worship of the Creator, and to an earnest
effort on our part so to shape our lives among ourselves
and in relation to the outside world that we may feel that
we have done our part in bringing a little nearer the day
when there shall be on this earth a genuine brotherhood
of man.