p. 159 | Red-Hot Religion

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 13, 1875

Red-Hot Religion.

There is this to be said in behalf of revivalists like Varley and Moody and Sankey, that they warm up people's religion when it is cold, and put a little temporary life into it. They do not pretend to teach new doctrines, nor to inculcate new precepts. Their hearers are presumed to know, and in fact do know, all about the subject of their discourses. Their task is to revive faded impressions, rouse dormant feelings, and quicken dead emotions, and in some aspects of the case they do good. Just as vice, by familiarity, grows less odious, so virtue, after long practice, sometimes loses its attractiveness; and by dressing it in a new garb and setting it in a new light, men may, perhaps, be won back to their first love for it. Old truths gain additional force by being presented in an unusual form, and when the soul is heated red hot in the fire of stirring eloquence it may be more susceptible to good influences than in a state of cold worldliness.

The drawback to this possible benefit is that souls get cool again as easily and quickly as they get hot. Violent emotions are, from the very nature of the human constitution, transitory. If it were not so, revivalists would soon exhaust their field of labor. If all religious converts stayed converted, there would remain, after awhile, no more work of the kind to be done. Preachers thrive upon the recurrence of sinfulness in their hearers as doctors thrive upon the repeated violations of the laws of health by their patients. Statistics show that not more than one-third of the members admitted to the Methodist church on probation persevere in their religious course, and the same fact is presumably true of other denominations. Nor does this third continue in anything like their primitive fervor. They settle down into the usual humdrum, easy-going style of Christian, and need a fresh revival as much as their backsliding and unconverted brethren.

Worse than this, after a soul has been heated red hot and then cools off, it is not so easy to warm it up again. Cast-iron melted over once or twice becomes refractory to the fiercest furnace, and men are something like it. There is a certain amount of kindling in them, and when that is burned out they defy the match. They become seasoned to the stimulus of eloquence as the toper becomes seasoned to Jersey lightning. They resist the pleadings of the orator as fruit trees blossoming out of season and then nipped by the frost resist the wooing of the summer sun. The germs of a religious life once killed, require another year in which to form, and fortunate is he to whom that additional year is granted.

Nor is this red-hot religion, while it lasts, of much practical value. Life is not made up of prayer-meetings and sermon hearing. Men must do their work in the world, and women must attend to their households. It is in the trials and exigencies of every-day affairs that religious principle is really tested. It is easy enough to sing hymns and shout amen to a preacher's exhortations, but how is it about dealing honestly in business, doing justice to one's neighbor, and living generally according to the ten commandments? It may be a popular error, but there is a wide-spread belief that eminent piety in the church is no hindrance to profound rascality down town or vinegar-tempered behavior in the domestic circle. The revivalists do nothing to destroy this conviction, because they are aiming at something else. They start a work which they do not stay to finish, and unless some one else takes it up, it comes to an end. So that after all, the best fruits of religion are due to the labors of the patient, steady minister, who never makes a sensation, but who attends to his daily duty, and, by words of warning, reproof and advice, faithfully cultivates the field which his Master has allotted to him.—N. Y. Paper.