The Warning Unwelcome by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Oct 2, 1913

The Warning Unwelcome

By C. M. S.

The backslidden church behaves very much like the backslidden individual. It prefers to be let alone, to stay where it is. The Lord, speaking through Jeremiah, says even of Babylon: “We would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed.” She did not want to be healed. She preferred to go in the way that carnal desire dictated; and so the Lord was compelled to abandon her.

Just so will it be with the “daughters of Babylon” in the last days—the creed-bound, world-loving churches. The Lord will be compelled to leave them to their own ruin, even as he was compelled to leave the great mother in ages past. Occasionally one of the Lord’s servants speaks out in warning. A few may hear; but the pleasure-loving throng press on, and not infrequently they seek to hush the voice that sought to warn them.

An instance of this kind was witnessed in the setting aside of Bishop Foster of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He did not take a roseate view of the spiritual conditions in that church body, and, in the hope of bringing the people to a sense of their true condition, he published a warning in the Methodist Journal. There is food for thought in what the bishop said to his fellow church-members; and the fact that he was set aside when he had given his warning, makes the hopelessness of the conditions all the more apparent. He said:—

The church of God is today courting the world. Its members are trying to bring it down to the level of the ungodly. The ball, the theater, nude and lewd art, social luxuries, with all their loose moralities, are making inroads into the sacred enclosure of the church; and as a satisfaction for all this worldliness, Christians are making a great deal of Lent and Easter and Good Friday and church ornamentations. It is the old trick of Satan. The Jewish church struck on that rock, the Romish Church was wrecked on the same, and the Protestant church is fast reaching the same doom.

Our great dangers, as we see them, are assimilation to the world, neglect of the poor, substitution of the form for the fact of godliness, abandonment of discipline, a hireling ministry, an impure gospel, which, summed up, is a fashionable church. That Methodists should be liable to such an outcome, and that there should be signs of it in a hundred years from the “sail-loft,” seems almost the miracle of history; but who that looks about him today can fail to see the fact?

Do not Methodists, in violation of God’s Word and their own discipline, dress as extravagantly and as fashionably as any other class? Do not the ladies, and often the wives and daughters of the ministry, put on gold and pearls and costly array? Would not the plain dress insisted upon by John Wesley, Bishop Asbury, and worn by Hester Ann Rogers, Lady Huntingdon, and many others equally distinguished, be now regarded in Methodist circles as fanaticism? Can any one, going into the Methodist church in any of our chief cities, distinguish the attire of the communicants from that of the theater- and ball-goers? Is not worldliness seen in the music? Elaborately dressed and ornamented choirs, who, in many cases, make no profession of religion, and are often sneering skeptics, go through a cold, artistic or operatic performance, which is as much in harmony with spiritual worship as an opera or theater. Under such worldly performance spirituality is frozen to death.

Formerly every Methodist attended class, and gave testimony of experimental religion. Now the class-meeting is attended by very few, and is, in many churches, abandoned. Seldom the stewards, trustees, and leaders of the church attend class. Formerly nearly every Methodist prayed, testified, or exhorted in prayer-meeting. Now but very few are heard. Formerly shouts and praises were heard; now such demonstrations of holy enthusiasm and joy are regarded as fanaticism.

Worldly socials, fairs, festivals, concerts, and such like, have taken the place of the religious gatherings, revival meetings, class- and prayer-meetings of earlier days.

How true that the Methodist discipline is a dead letter. Its rules forbid the wearing of gold or pearls or costly array; yet no one ever thinks of disciplining its members for violating them. They forbid the reading of such books and the taking of such diversions as do not minister to godliness, yet the church itself goes to shows and frolics and festivals and fairs, which destroy the spiritual life of the young as well as the old. The extent to which this is now carried on is appalling. The spiritual death it carries in its train will only be known when the millions it has swept into hell stand before the judgment.

This bishop’s statement of conditions in his own church is just as true of the other large church bodies in general. It is the condition of the great church world today,—a form of godliness with the power lacking, and the zeal and love that once were so evident now waxing cold, while the easy professor turns to pleasures and pursuits of his own liking. Seeing the conditions as they exist now, and knowing that they were divinely foreshown as indications of the last days, how can the child of God turn to the allurements of the world, and refuse to believe that the coming of our Saviour is drawing nigh? When God sends reproof for coldness and worldliness, it is not because he desires to condemn, but because he desires to save us from the awful consequences of our own course. We must heed his warnings; we must push the battle to the gates; we must divest ourselves of every clog of selfishness and every tie that would bind us to the service of the world.

C. M. S.