AN ALARMING SYMPTOM

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 15, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 37.

AN ALARMING SYMPTOM.

THE leading article in the Missionary Review of the World for September is by the editor-in-chief, Dr. A. T. Pierson. It is entitled, “A Great Exigency in the Work of Missions.—The Fact, the Causes, the Remedy.” It certainly should arouse the Christian world to its condition of stupor and apathy.

The article first calls attention to the necessity of candor, of facing the situation as it is, to know the very facts and to feel their force. We are then told that—

such candor makes impossible blindness to certain patent and alarming facts. No such emergency in missions has been known since Carey went to India and Judson to Burma. God has thrown open the doors of five continents, given every facility for rapid travel and transportation, and supplied translations of the Scripture by the hundreds, and provided for their swift multiplication by the press, and their wide scattering over the globe. Fifty millions of communicants are in Protestant churches, with untold millions of money at their disposal. We are at the threshold of a new century, with a hundred years of heroic missionary lives behind us, and with astonishing fruits of their seed-growing already apparent in many lands. Yet, at this very time, missions have come to such a critical state that, like Nehemiah, we have sounded the trumpet to call all the Lord’s workers to the one place in the wall where for the time the assault of the enemy is concentrated.

In the face of these facts “the cry goes forth on all sides, ‘Retrench!’ and we can not send new laborers or even support those now in the field; and there is a general apprehension, on the part of intelligent friends of missions, that matters are apparently growing worse instead of better.”

Dr. Pierson mentions as the causes of this apathy:—

1. “The scientific spirit of the day.” Science has made marvelous strides, and “men make a god of science, become idolaters, and practically if not actually say, ‘There is no God.’” And science in the form of evolution has come in to set aside regeneration through faith in Christianity. Its drift is towards materialism and naturalism and away from the supernatural and the spiritual.

2. “The liberal spirit,” which admits other religions as on a par or in the same category with Christianity. “While sectarian rivalries had scarce abated their violence, parliaments of religion were welcoming representatives of every conceivable creed, negative and positive, to a fraternal embrace.” This is saying in effect that Christianity is only a sister religion.

3. “The secular spirit.” “The church in our day is essentially secularized.” The church has become engrossed with the world, and has no burden for lost souls. And the writer might have told us what we know to be true, the church is vainly endeavoring to find in politics the power she has lost by unbelief. Dr. Pierson asks: “Dares any honest man dispute that the prevailing atmosphere of church life is essentially secular? that wealth, fashion, fame, formalism, culture, caste, polite society, worldly opinion, intellectuality, have crowded out simple worship, self-denial, passion for souls, devoutness of spirit, spirituality, and whole-souled devotion to God?” All this is hostile to missions.

4. “The selfish spirit,” manifest in ostentatious extravagance, in hoarded wealth by professing disciples, in self-indulgence, etc. All of which, of course, shows that the church is in great part unregenerate, and has not the Spirit of Christ, leading to open infidelity in repudiating a part or the whole of the Holy Scriptures.

The picture is a sad one, but “the candid mind” will acknowledge its truthfulness in general and particular. Dr. Pierson well says: “It behooves us to ask candidly whether the prevalence of a scientific, liberal, secular, and selfish spirit, such as we have seen to prevail even in the church, is not virtually a repudiation of the Holy Spirit as the divine administrator in the church.”

The remedy suggested is (1) “a more complete submission to the divine authority;” (2) “a far higher form of identification with God,” “sympathy with His plan and love;” (3) “a thoroughly Biblical hope as the basis of our work;” (4) “supreme dependence on God and on the means He has instituted”—“going,” “sending,” “giving,” “praying.”

And let us add, O church of the living God, by whatever name called, that the remedy is found in the reception and giving of His own last Gospel message (Rev. 14:6–14) to prepare a people for His coming.