Christian Enthusiasm

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 8, 1873

Christian Enthusiasm.

It has passed into a maxim that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with a will. No one was ever thoroughly successful in any important work of life, who had not something like a passion for his calling, whether farmer, mechanic, artist, man of science, or letters, a teacher, or one devoted to any of the learned professions, a statesman, or a sovereign, he who does not magnify his office by throwing himself into it with a genuine ardor, will reach but moderate results, though he occupy himself with his particular vocation through even a long life. The men who keep the whole world from stagnation; who strike out new paths, rouse others into activity, and inaugurate new eras of progress; who, in spite of difficulties, achieve great things, and triumphantly leave the monuments of their energy and genius standing admired through ages, are men who are wide awake and full of earnestness—an earnestness in which intellect and heart are both enlisted. It is this sort of earnestness in which far-seeing wisdom is combined with the vitalizing glow of ardent feeling, which should be recognized as the true enthusiasm. It is to be carefully distinguished from the frenzy of sudden and great excitements, and from the impulsive recklessness that is often energetic in proportion as it is blind.

Christian enthusiasm, then, is that earnestness in the Christian life and work in which right purpose is instinct with Christian feeling. It is the intelligent zeal of one who loves Christ and longs to do his will. Jesus himself, calm and self-poised as he always was, exhibited it in his whole public ministry, and expressed it when he said, “My meat and my drink is to do the will of him that sent me.” Paul described it when he wrote, “It is good to be zealously affected always in a good

thing.” He illustrated it most signally in that wonderful apostolic career in which he out-labored his fellow apostles, and went unflinchingly through all manner of hardships to martyrdom itself. There must be a glorious record in the book of God of the names of vast numbers, down through the ages, who kept the vestal fire of an intense and self-devoted love habitually burning on the altar of their hearts. It has been mainly by the lives and labors of such that Christianity has been made an effective force in the world, and has steadily advanced. It is by the aggressive activities of such that she stands erect and extends her influence on every side to-day. In all the evangelical churches there are doubtless some who are truly fervent in spirit and fruitful in well-doing.

But yet, taking the great body of professed disciples together, what a painful lack of Christian enthusiasm do we see! The opposite to Christian enthusiasm is Christian conventionalism—that bondage to custom and prescribed methods which begets content with ordinary measures of success and the ordinary rate of movement, and discourages Christian aspiration and enterprise. How many churches and individual Christians are held, by means of this, as if in fetters, grinding contentedly in the mill of a cold and almost mechanical formalism, when they ought to be inwardly stirred with holy impulses and putting forth free and diversified activities! Birds may be kept so long caged as to lose both the will and the power to fly. So it would seem as if many disciples, long used to a fixed routine, have lost the appetite for spontaneous Christian effort, and no longer feel themselves able to go forth and bear their part in the great melee of life as champions for the right. Order and propriety are certainly excellent things as means; but, when they are changed to ends, and become walls within which to shut up active Christian energy so as to keep it from doing anything effectively, they are utterly perverted from their legitimate use, and set in false relations. The true Christian spirit is by no means a spirit of recklessness and anarchy; but neither is it so fastidious about methods as to be content to do nothing at all, for fear it may not work precisely according to the most exquisite ideals. It will rather seize a drowning man by the hair of his head than to let him drown because it hesitates to outrage the conventional proprieties.

The truth is, that but very few things in the great, complicated business of Christian living can be so arranged as to move on in a fixed routine. All the circumstances, activities, and drift of society—the tastes, habits, follies, weaknesses, perils, sins of those who compose it—are subject to perpetual change. The devil does not marshal his forces according to a stereotyped book of tactics, and put them under martinets charged to see that they always work by the same rules and do nothing on the battle-field that would be unbecoming on a dress parade. Because he is in dead earnest, he exhibits his intellectual power, his versatility, his manifold resources, in new movements and combinations, new stratagems and wiles, in changing his points of attack, his weapons, and his battle-cries, from hour to hour, if need be. In such circumstances, and with such an adversary, the ministry, the local church, the Christian man and woman individually, ought not to expect to do much toward making the world better, if they insist on the statu quo—on working always in the one conventional way. New plans and agencies, new lines of effort, new means of awakening and holding attention, fresh stimulants to thought and fresh motive to exertion, are perpetually needed. The work of to-day is not the work of yesterday. It is not the work that to-morrow will impose.

He only, therefore, can be a successful Christian worker who is able to comprehend the present exigency, and to do promptly what it demands. Right purpose alone and moving along the beaten path may fail to do this. Right purpose, all aglow with healthful Christian feeling, a genuine Christian enthusiasm, in other words, is much more likely to accomplish it. This quickens every faculty, and greatly intensifies the power of attention and decision. It is broad in its views, fertile in expedients, and determined in its efforts. It supplies the steady impulse necessary to Christian enterprise, and does not soon die, like a mere occasional excitement. A person in conventional bondage is like a wheel in a groove, that may easily be blocked. One who is warmed with an intelligent Christian enthusiasm is more like an eagle, that, free and unhampered, soars when and where he will. Could the thousands of well-instructed Christians in the churches, could the great body of sound and able ministers who are the leaders of the sacramental hosts, rise to a glow of enthusiasm in the work of Christ in some good degree proportioned to the grandeur of the issues it involves, it cannot be doubted that the Christian cause would be seen advancing with vastly augmented speed.

Is such a thing to be reasonably anticipated? Yes. It must not only be anticipated, but realized, before the kingdom of God can come with power. To become painfully sensible how much we need a warmer, deeper, holier earnestness—this is the first thing.

To place our souls more fully under the legitimate impression of the glorious person and the redeeming work of Christ—our hearts in closer contact with the throbbings of his heart in its deep sympathy with a suffering world—this is the thing next in order. To ask more and expect more of the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, so that, like primitive saints, we may live in the Spirit and not after the flesh—may be full of the Holy Ghost and of faith—this is the third thing; all of which amounts simply to saying that, we must attain to be more thoroughly Christlike, and to exemplify in ourselves that devotion to him on which the whole New Testament insists. Christian enthusiasm can only be produced and sustained by a living contact with God and the open vision of divine and eternal realities. It will come only with a flood-tide of heavenly influences setting in on the hearts of ministers and churches, and bringing them up to a nobler type of piety. It must be looked for, therefore, in answers to prayer, in the far-reaching revival of religion through rich outpourings of the Spirit, and in more hearty and resolute personal self-sacrifice and self-devotion. Christian reader, rest not till your own heart glows as if with seraphic fire.—Independent.