p. 248 | N. Y. Churches

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 17, 1868

N. Y. Churches.

THE NEW-YORK correspondent of Zion's Herald holds rather an unfavorable opinion of some of the fashionable churches of New York. He writes: “The namby-pamby churches will never save this city. They do not even save the richly-clothed sinners that sit in their pews, much less do they amount to anything in a hand-to-hand fight with the multitudes that crowd the lower circles. There are a large number of churches in New York that have no more effect upon the religious character of the city than if they were heathen pagodas. They are simply rallying places for worldliness and fashion, and the broadest possible burlesque on the self-denying religion of the blessed Saviour. I judge that the apostle Paul would make scattering work with some of our New York churches, if happening here on a fine Sunday, he should make the sweep of Broadway and the Fifth Avenue, and I am perfectly sure that the rugged old innovator would be regarded as a nuisance, and that the church officials would set the metropolitan police upon him; and if it might not be regarded as too severe, I wonder how many of even the New York Methodists would be willing to go bail for the arrested apostle? The revival that is to save New York, that is to shut up her theaters and dance-houses and concert-saloons and rum-holes, the revival that is to reform her municipal officers, and convert her Catholics and Jews and infidels, must be begun in her churches. We must get rid of our sham religion, and go back to the simplicity and truthfulness and power of the New-Testament times.”