Facts for the Times by C. H. Bliss

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 26, 1872

Facts for the Times.

By C. H. Bliss

RELIGIOUS ZEAL.

Here are some sensible remarks from DeWitt Talmage, written with special reference to the work accomplished by a large tent, conducted by the Methodists, which has been pitched lately in Salt Lake City.

Oh! for more big tents! Four long stakes and a big piece of canvas, and four or five Christians on fire with zeal, have proved themselves able to shake Brigham's Tabernacle, that cost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

There is such a thing as too much deliberation in religion. The game gets away from us while we are loading the gun. The Methodist Church, like the Presbyterian and Baptist and Episcopalian, has of late, felt the tendency to settle on its lees, and build granite churches, and whittle its old-time hallelujahs down to a quartette, and hand the people up to Heaven with delicate kid-gloves which, at the least strain, split in the back. I would not give one of the backwoods Methodist meetings, where I used, in boyhood, occasionally to go and stand at the door, afraid to go in—for they had fifty persons converted there in one night—for a hundred precise churches where they preserve their religion from spoiling by keeping it on ice.

We want a flashing up of the old-time Christian heroics. So afraid is a church of a sensation, that it goes into stagnation. It costs from one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build a church in which to get a few hundred people to Heaven, when those two hundred and fifty thousand dollars rightly applied, would build gospel advantages for ten times the number. In addition to church history and the dead languages, we want a new professorate in our theological seminaries; one that will teach our candidates for the ministry how to shoot on the wing.

Shall we not also cry out for more “big tents,” and more preachers that are on “fire with zeal;” men that have the word of God burning in them as fire in their bones; men that are not so afraid of sensation that they will realize the opposite—“stagnation.”

Oh for more of that holy zeal that was manifested by Paul as he stood before Felix, or of a Peter as he stood up on the day of Pentecost and declared to the Jewish people that they had crucified the Son of God, or of John, the beloved disciple, as he boldly declares, He that saith, I know him and keepeth not his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

Says the Lord, “Cry aloud and spare not,—lift up thy voice like a trumpet,—and show my people their transgressions and the house of Jacob their sins.”

C. H. BLISS.