Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · February 11, 1868

THE CHURCH AND WORLD.

Under the apparently serious heading of “Progression,” a writer in the St. Clair Republican utters the following cutting, because just, satire upon professors of religion of the present day:

Mr. Editor: That this is an age of wonderful improvement and progression is apparent to the most superficial observer. Individuals progress; nations progress; societies and churches progress.

In the religious world, we had the rigors of the Mosaic dispensation; then the more gentle teachings of Christ and his disciples; and now an almost entire freedom from ecclesiastical restraints; and perhaps this advancement is more marked, rapid and surprising among the so-called Orthodox churches than in any other connection. But a few years ago we had all the horrors of the Inquisition; more lately, the “blue laws” of New England, forbidding a man to kiss his own wife on the Sabbath day; and now, church members luxuriating in the most extravagant of worldly amusements.

Formerly, the minister of the Gospel—a shadow to the old and a ghost to the young—could be identified at the farthest possible range of the human vision, by the simplicity of his dress and his style, and churchmen were known by their “daily walk and conversation.” Latterly, the lengthened visage of the minister has been contracted into a genial smile, and his enjoyment of an evening’s entertainment with the people of the world is of the most superlative degree; and church members, whether at a fashionable church festival or on a ride to a neighboring village, shake the light, fantastic toe with as much vigor as their unregenerated neighbors. And when we behold, with wondering admiration, the strange (though not unfamiliar) phenomenon of the strong orthodox arm of some pretended follower of the lowly Nazarene, whirling the voluptuous form of a modern Venus through the measured tread of the quadrille to the soul-stirring strains of the violin, we feel inclined to exclaim with one of old, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian!”

In view of the fact that “revolutions never go backward,” is it not reasonable to suppose that this same spirit of generous progression will continue to disseminate itself until all mankind are united in one happy, joyful family—the Jew and the Gentile, the saint and the sinner, the church and the world; and that the day is not far distant when the minister will be seen on Sabbath mornings going to his church with a Bible in one hand and a violin in the other, prepared to vary the religious exercises of the day according to his own inclinations or the requirements of his congregation?