“And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is. And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass. . . . Ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern THIS time?” Luke 12:54-56.
“And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things? And he said, Go thy way, Daniel; for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly; and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.” Dan. 12:8-10.
Power and Life
GENUINE Christianity means power—power to reach human hearts and transform and transfigure them into the image of the Christ heart, of the Christ character. The Gospel, which is the power of God to save sinners, is a revolutionary force. Taught and practised in its purity by men who themselves have experienced its saving and transforming power in their lives, the Christian religion inevitably carries conviction to individual souls, and leads them to repentance and moral reformation. Christianity means the religion of Jesus Christ, and to Him was given of God all power in heaven and in earth; and this power, infinite and eternal, is the power of His religion—of Christianity.
We often hear of the power of Pentecostal days, but those were simply the days of pure Christianity—days of its normal manifestation in both precept and practise. Primitive Christianity was a miracle-working power, a revolutionary force, because it had in it the creative power of its Author. Not infrequently, on a single day, through the preaching of one man, this power shivered into atoms the chains that held in moral bondage the souls of thousands of men and women. The bitterest enemies of the Christian religion testified that its power “turned the world upside down.” It was a power before which the pagan world-empire of Rome quailed. It was a power that purged the leper, cast out demons, raised the dead to life; a power that enabled the Christian martyr, wrapped in devouring flame, to expend his expiring breath in songs of praise to his Redeemer.
Is the nominal Christian church to-day, in these opening years of the twentieth century of her history, still in possession of her pristine faith, purity, and consequent power? Does she continue to stir and revolutionize society as she did in the days of Paul and Peter? The answer, No, instinctively leaps to the tongue of every thinking soul. We are to-day confronted with the startling fact that in all parts of Christendom the overwhelming majority of the people are estranged from Christianity as represented by the historic churches.
A Multitude of Witnesses
In Great Britain, seventy-five per cent of the adult population remain permanently out of touch with organized religion. On the continent of Europe this falling away of the people from the churches is far more marked than in England. In December, 1908, that noted journalist, Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, declared that “uncounted Americans whose ancestors looked to the church as the chief inspiration of their daily existence, no longer attend any church. Other thousands, tho still nominally members or attendants, have ceased to admit the church or its ministers as a really vital influence in their lives.” The sumptuously equipped, often lavishly endowed, under the leadership of an educated clergy, the church, taken as a whole, no longer influences the great body of the people.
In one of his last sermons, the late Rev. Dr. George C. Lorimer said: “There is such a thing as a religious crisis in America, however much we may scoff at the idea. Religion is to-day at a very low vitality.” The Rev. Dr. Walter Laidlow, after making extensive sociological and statistical studies of church conditions in this country, estimated that in New York City alone there were, in 1905, 1,071,981 churchless Protestants; that is, adult persons whose antecedents were Protestants. An eminent Presbyterian leader, the Rev. Chas. Stelzle, recently said: “The church to-day seems to have arrived at one of the most crucial periods of her history. . . . No one can successfully deny that the church is slowly but surely losing ground in the city. . . . Within recent years forty Protestant churches moved out of the district below Twentieth Street, in New York City, while 300,000 people moved in. Alarmed for her safety and her very life, the church has sounded a dismal retreat in the face of the greatest opportunity that has ever come to her.” Mr. Stelzle declares that the same shameful movement has been relatively duplicated in every city in America.
“Every one,” says the Rev. Madison C. Peters, “who knows the emptiness of the pews in nearly all the Protestant churches in New York, knows also that so far as Protestants are concerned, New Yorkers have ceased to be a church-going people. The failure of the church to reach the people is not only a numerical failure—for numbers do not always represent power and influence—but it is a failure of quality as well as quantity.”
In a lecture delivered in the last year of his life, Dr. Lorimer said regarding the country churches: “The people are falling away. Even entire churches in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, have been blotted out, and others have been so reduced in strength as to be slowly perishing. In many instances the preaching has lost the note of authority, and is rarely attractive. Prayer-meetings are poorly sustained; money for the work is not easy to obtain; and interest in evangelism and the salvation of souls is distinctly on the wane.”
This is a serious indictment, but unfortunately it is true. In the London “Commonwealth,” not long ago, a correspondent declared that church attendance in England had fallen off fifty per cent during the last half century. The figures, he avers, are paralleled in other countries. They apply to the rural districts as well as to the cities.
At the great Roman Catholic missionary conference held last spring in Chicago, Archbishop Falconio, apostolic delegate from the pope, said: “In our day a spirit of religious indifference and relaxation of Christian morality is permeating the sanctuary of Christian families. To check this dangerous tendency, we need a revival of the true Christian spirit.”
In the “Arena,” February, 1908, Mr. George Allan England says, “For the present it seems quite within the facts to say that with the sole exception of the Christian Science faith, the church has entered upon a period of marked decadence, and that dogmatic religion in these latter times of ours has fallen on evil days.” Under the caption “Churches Can’t Get Ministers,” the Philadelphia “Press” for Jan. 5, 1907, said: “Sincere alarm is being expressed by religious teachers all over this country and in Europe, at the falling off in the numbers of candidates for the ministry. . . . So marked is this decline that grave fears are held as to the possibility of keeping churches supplied with ministers. . . . It is pointed out that even now the supply does not equal the demands of the churches.”
To say that the Christian church, generally, is spiritually anemic, impotent, and halting, is to utter what has long since become a mere platitude. That she has lost the power and aggressiveness which normally belongs to her, is universally admitted by friends and foes alike. Is there an ascertainable cause for this lamentable status of nominal Christianity?—Most assuredly there is, and we need not look long to descry it.
The divine Founder of the Christian church, in His final and all-inclusive commission, given through His apostles to His messengers throughout the Gospel age, explicitly commanded them to teach all nations to observe all things that He had commanded the apostles to observe. But it has been absolutely impossible for any of the successors of the apostles to know what the Master commanded should be taught and observed except as it is revealed to them through the written Word—the Scriptures. It is through the Bible and the Bible only that the Head of the church has revealed and handed down to us His will—the will of God—concerning us. Hence success in the propagation of the Christian faith can be realized only as we remain unswervingly loyal to the Master’s instructions as enunciated in the Scriptures. “The words that I speak unto you,” He declares, “they are spirit, and they are life.” Again, through His apostle He asserts that “the Word of God is quick and powerful.”
Summary of Results
To repudiate the Word of God, therefore, is to repudiate the Spirit, life, and power of God revealed in Christ. This is precisely what the church, in general, has done. So widely and notoriously patent has this melancholy fact become, that to attempt to prove it would insult the reader’s intelligence. To refresh7our memories and vivify old impressions, I shall venture, however, to state anew that nearly all the scholarly leaders of the Christian churches, those who pose as the sponsors of the Christian faith, as the custodians and interpreters of the Bible, now deny the historicity of the Genesis account of creation, or the fall of man, of the Deluge, of the confounding of tongues at Babel; they scout the idea that the Scriptures are uniformly inerrant; they deny the literal reality of miracles both of Old Testament and New Testament times. Naturally and logically, then, they disclaim faith in the superhuman birth of Jesus, and therefore in the atoning or vicarious nature of His death on the cross; they must therefore, to be consistent, deny that Jesus underwent a physical resurrection, or that He ascended bodily to heaven. Denying the miraculous character of Jesus’ birth, they necessarily toss to the winds the doctrine of His divinity. They declare that the ultimate source of spiritual authority lies in the individual human conscience, rather than in the Scriptures. They hold, of course, that there is a SENSE in which Christ was divine, and that is the sense in which every man is divine. In short, they repudiate everything in the Bible which is humanly incomprehensible, and therefore stigmatize the good old Book as of purely human origin.
“And this, knowing the season, that now it is high time for you to awake out of sleep; for now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, and the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.” Rom. 13: 11, 12.
The apostle Peter testifies that it was the Spirit of God that moved upon the hearts of those who wrote the Scriptures and constrained them to write as they did. This being true, it follows inevitably that he who minimizes the Scriptures slights and grieves the divine Spirit. He thus separates himself from the power of God, for His power is imparted through His Spirit, as attested by our Lord when He said to His apostles, “But ye shall receive POWER after that the HOLY SPIRIT is come upon you.” To repudiate the Bible, then, is to repudiate the divine agency through whom alone divine power can be imparted. That the nominal Christian church is languishing, is not at all to be wondered at.
“It begins to look,” wrote the editor of “Harper’s Weekly,” July 3, 1909, “as if the dictionary makers would have to frame a new definition for orthodoxy before long. A few weeks ago the Chicago Baptists refused to turn down Professor Foster in the face of his repudiation of the authority of the Scriptures and his denial of the deity of Christ, and now the Presbytery of New York admits to the pulpit young Mr. Black of Edinburgh, who accepts the story of Adam and Eve ONLY AS A FIGURE, acknowledges the divinity of Christ but not the virgin birth, and does not believe in the story of His bodily resurrection. Substantially, as we make them out, both Professor Foster and Mr. Black subscribe to the Unitarian theory. . . . Whither we are drifting is difficult to determine, but that the current is strong and rapid is certain.”
