THE CRACKLING FIRE PIT.
By James C. Fernald
WE are just in the crackling picket-fire of one of the most tremendous conflicts of the centuries. America, the Armageddon—and, as yet, the churches don't know what is coming upon them. They are like men suddenly disturbed from sleep around the camp-fire, perplexed, stiff, and uncomfortable, with no enemy so manifest as the sentinel who has stirred them up. They don't know why it is that it seems to them pharisaical to object to Sabbath desecration; why it seems cruel to keep their boys and girls from the opera and (speak low) the theater and card playing, and—in the cities—beaded champaign in cut glass at fashionable weddings. Well, brethren, Unpopular, austere, and what not, to object to all this? Simply because we are outnumbered. Like the waters of the great deep, there are coming in to us the long oppressed Irish, whose idea of liberty is resistance to authority; English and Scotch, who decorate the table with great pitchers of ale and dainty bottles of wine at their holy convocations; Frenchmen who live pour s'amuser—to be entertained—and cannot conceive what Sunday is for if not for entertainment par excellence; Germans to whom the Catholic Church “made Christians” and Luther “made Protestants,” and both so long ago that they inherit their religion along with their love for lager, tobacco, and music; Italians, just emancipated from their “bull-dozing” of centuries; Spaniards out of whom the Inquisition crushed thought for five hundred years, and whom misgovernment turned perforce into guerrillas; Russian Nihilists, reveling in sweet dreams of primeval chaos and Pandemonium let loose. But we may not stop to particularize. The Mexican, the Mormon, the Materialist, the Socialist, the Jesuit, “childlike and bland;”—ignorance, folly, vice, infidel-wisdom, ungodliness in infinite variety—outnumber ten to one the old, educated, church-going, law-abiding, God-fearing element. Nothing is more deceptive than our statistics of “NATIVE-BORN AMERICANS.” Ten years give us millions of them, their fathers and mothers not yet able to speak our language, not emancipated from one error or vice or prejudice of whatever was their “old country;” and the children have them all, with the language and the American sense of freedom, power, sovereignty. They only are native-born Americans who are such in soul—in some true sense “born of the spirit” into that republicanism and Christianity which have made America what it is. And we are looking coolly on while this explosive mixture is stirred up against the Lord and against his anointed, and proposing to let down all the old restraints of religion in order that our own sons and daughters may be comfortably fused in the undistinguishable mass. If America is saved, it will be by a “peculiar people,” whether they be called Methodists, Baptists, Dunkers or Quakers—a people who will not buy nor sell, nor travel, and will worship, on the Sabbath—who will be as strict as Paul, non-conforming as John Knox—a people as sharply distinguished from the society of modern America as the Christians of Corinth were from the gay, brilliant, pleasure-loving society of the Isthmian metropolis. It is no harder now than then, and will be just as profitable. The next twenty-five years will tell whether the church shall conquer the hosts for Christ, or whether they shall overwhelm the church, and take from it all that makes it more an æsthetic philosophical society. If the church is to do this tremendous piece of work—a task far greater than the evangelization of the old Roman Empire—it will need an army of Luthers and Calvins, Wesleys and Whitefields, University men, learned as the proudest unbelievers, devout as the humblest of saints. “We are living, we are dwelling,
In a grand and awful time.
In an age on ages swelling,
To be living is sublime!”
—Rev. J. C. Fernald, in Journal and Messenger.