Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles Hodge

Hodge is smuggling a quiet revolution into a sentence that looks like plain church order. He starts with a premise his 19th-century Protestant audience already accepts: believers submit, in some real way, to the discipline, counsel, and correction of their local church. Then he springs the trapdoor. If the rationale for that submission is spiritual rather than bureaucratic - shared Lord, shared gospel, shared obligations of charity and accountability - the logic doesn’t stop at the parish boundary. It expands outward until every Christian becomes, at least in principle, your “brethren,” with a claim on your conscience.

The intent is ecumenical, but not mushy. Hodge isn’t saying denominations don’t matter; he’s saying their authority is derivative. The church’s moral claim over you cannot be grounded in mere membership rolls, because that would make “subjection” a function of paperwork. He roots it in union with Christ, which instantly creates a universal fraternity that no single institution can monopolize.

The subtext is polemical: a rebuke to sectarianism that treats other Christians as second-class or as strangers, and a warning to any church tempted to act like a gated community. In Hodge’s America, where Presbyterian debates over polity, revivalism, and “true church” identity were live wires, this is a bid to keep confessional seriousness from curdling into tribal sovereignty. It’s also a soft limit on authoritarian churchmanship: if your local elders demand a kind of deference you’d never grant to believers elsewhere, the problem may not be “elsewhere.”