UNPROFITABLE SOCIAL MEETINGS.
By N. W.
WHAT would be thought of a convention of persons professing to be teachers, who never did any teaching and never intended to do any, and yet assembled every week for mutual congratulation on the delights of their profession? Some such paradox is seen in the weekly gatherings of Christians to talk of their enjoyment and progress in the divine life with no thought or plans for aggressive work in winning souls. Their exercises inevitably become common-place and destitute of interest. Stereotype methods and prayers and testimonies in the social meeting should be displaced, and each participant's claim to a hearing should depend upon its activity and efficiency in inducing men to seek Christ. "What is the state of your feelings?" should always be the leading question to believers. Every prayer and class meeting should be a council of workers, to canvass ways and means to save souls. Every prayer offered, every word uttered, should bear on this point. It is the lack of this practical use of social meetings that causes them to languish. It is difficult to maintain much interest in what relates exclusively to our own or others' personal feelings and aspirations, when we have told or heard it fifty-two times a year, with little or no variation. We tire of such meetings and of our part in them. They have no interest for the unconverted. The way to make the social meeting a power for good and a source of perennial interest and enthusiasm is to make it a business meeting, in which men who are working for God stimulate each other to greater activity, and talk, not in stilted, stereotyped phrases about how they feel toward God, but in the most earnest, simple manner, of how they shall best glorify him by doing his work.
—N. W. Christian Advocate.