Disintegrating Protestantism

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 20, 1913

Disintegrating Protestantism

THAT disintegrating elements are at work in the great Protestant bodies to-day, is recognized by others than Seventh-day Adventists. Speaking of this weakening process which is now going forward the Christian Appeal, published at Greenwood, S. C., says:—

The editor of an organ of the Northern Methodist Church is responsible for the statement that “Protestantism is losing its religious character and becoming a civil force.” This is a far-reaching and profoundly significant statement; it is made by a man in high official position with every opportunity to know the facts; it is the utterance of a man who expresses his convictions when he knows that by so doing he subjects himself to sharp, keen, and bitter criticism, and possibly the loss of his official head. But that utterance is worth, as a warning, more to the church than the babbling of a thousand men who have no eyes to see, no ears to understand, no convictions to express and maintain. . . .

Is Methodism losing her religious character? Other Protestants may speak for themselves, but we can not deny that we have lost our spiritual power. We have a compact organization, but it is permeated with a spirit of unrest. We keep up the form of godliness, while we are without the power. Are we losing our religious character? Have we not, in the true sense of those words, lost it already? . . . Have we not built handsome churches and furnished them extravagantly? Have we not given hundreds and thousands to charity, benevolence, and missions? Why should God withhold his approval and his blessings? Why should he hide his face and deny us power? In what spirit did we those things? Others cast of their abundance into the treasury, but they received neither reward nor commendation. Were we actuated less by pride of heart than loyalty to God?

If Protestantism is drifting into a civil force, a political power, then she becomes a failure both as a political force and as a church, because she departed from faith in the living God and sacrificed her mission.

True indeed is it that when Protestantism drifts into a civil force and

becomes a political power, she becomes a failure in her God-given work; a failure also in the new rôle which she assumes. She has departed from God's will, great design for her, and is left to reap the fruits of her own apostasy. The extent, to which the great churches of Christendom to-day reach out after social prestige and political favors indicates their departure from the true work that Heaven gave them to perform.