THE FOLLY OF FASHIONABLE RELIGION by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 7, 1877

THE FOLLY OF FASHIONABLE RELIGION.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

Upon this point there are so many good things said, and so well said, that I want the readers of the Review to have the benefit of some of them. The following is from a tract entitled, Pure Religion, published by the American Tract Society:—

“‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ Jas. 1:27.

“The devil can be religious; nor is he awkward at it. He can be natural and clever in religion, not overdoing the matter by cant, and not underdoing it by ill-timed gayety. And this religion is a real religion; that is, it is a service, a worship. And that is what religion in the strict sense means. In Greek ‘θρησκεία,’ in Latin ‘religio,’ it has reference primarily and principally to the outward actions, as conformable to a certain system.

“There is, therefore, (as we see in this passage,) a vain religion as well as a pure religion. They are both real religions; they have external exercises; they are visible and noticeable by outsiders. They are not only, both of them, symmetrical religions and real religions, but they are, in their human adherents, honest religions. Their votaries are equally sincere. They are not hypocrites, but believe in what they do. God is the ostensible object of worship in each religion. ‘I believe in God’ is the first article in the creed of each. And yet these two religions are as far asunder as the poles. The one is actuated by Satan, and the other by the Spirit of God; and yet Satan is so skilled a practitioner, that the very victims of his deceit do not know what spirit they are of.

“Where deceit is so easy and complete, in regard, too, to our highest interests, it behooves us to look to the distinguishing marks between the good and the evil, that God has set up. In this passage, the vain or empty religion is designated as one wherein the unbridled tongue deceives the heart. The tongue ought to be the servant of the heart; but one of the marks of man’s chaotic condition by reason of sin is in the tongue’s usurping the mastery, and bringing the heart into servitude. The tongue repeats glibly its credos and its pater-nosters, or talks eloquently on orthodoxy, and the sound is satisfying music to the heart. The tongue has charmed the heart into quiescence, and made it very honest in its false religion, as its complete dupe. And it is in this honesty that men pride themselves; just as if a drunkard should pride himself in his perfect honesty by which he sees double. The tongue-religionist thinks he has the testimony of a good conscience. He has the testimony of conscience, but not of a good one. It is the testimony of a drugged conscience. There was a time when he willfully allowed his conscience to be drugged, and now it is useless as a watch and guard.

“It is a grand triumph for Satan when he makes the tongue the seat of religion. When he gets religion out on the tongue, he encourages it with kindred helps, and fortifies it with the aid of the other senses. He builds magnificent cathedrals, with painting and statuary to delight the eye; he fills the ear with concord of sweet sounds; the odors of flowers or incense load the air; and so the tongue has its pleasant companions, to make the ways of its religion pleasantness and all its paths peace. The devil’s religion is a very beautiful religion. It has the best singers, tenors and sopranos and all the rest, with French names and German names and Italian names; and it has the most delectable violins and exquisite cornets; and it has the approbation of the first circles. It harmonizes most delicately with all the elegant ways of fashionable society, and has no rude and prying methods of making itself disagreeable in social and business life. So soft, so smooth, so poetic, and so respectable is this religion of the tongue, that it does seem a pity every one is not contented with it.

“But, unfortunately, there always are some angular people, who are ready to spoil every pleasant arrangement,—vulgar people, who believe in sin and depravity and hell—who would mar all our innocent frivolities with their talk of eternity or some other great and solemn thing that nobody wants to hear about. They are a low, psalm-singing set, who cannot rise to the seraphic loveliness of our refined religion of beauty, and are miserably awkward in our elevated society.

“Now all this is sincere speech on the part of the adherents of the devil’s religion. They are not playing a part, but look down from their lofty plane of respectable religion with sincere feelings of either contempt or pity, as the case may be, for the simple-minded believers in retribution and personal conversion. If sincerity made a saint, these would be saints of the first degree, for they have not a doubt of their own superiority to the mass of mankind. They firmly believe they are made of purer stuff than the rest, and are decidedly assured that God always is on the side of respectable people.

“When I see these poor, benighted sinners in velvet and gold, I wonder how they are ever to be reached with the gospel. The heathen of India and China are far more accessible, and their hearts are not so hard. They are on the ground, and you can reach them. There is some common interest between them and you. But these refined and respectable worshipers, who are so graceful in their devotions and so grand in their social life, are far up in the air above your heads; beautiful balloons, lifted so high by their gas that they think themselves favored of Heaven, to which they seem so near. There’s no soul more dead, no more hopeless heathen, no more putrid corpse of sin on earth, than a rich, fashionable Christian; for the very reason that the vain or empty religion with which the tongue has deceived the heart is so very satisfying to the superficial soul. All the healing, saving power of Christianity is assumed as in externals, and so the soul all dead, but with a name to live, is never alarmed; while the nominal heathen of India and China have no doctrine so comfortable as that of Christ and his salvation, to steal and use without a right.

“The apostle James, so early in the church’s history, saw quantities of these mummy Christians. He saw men with gold rings and grand apparel enter the church, who were shown at once to a choice pew near the pulpit. He saw a poor man with cheap raiment enter at the same time, who was pointed to a seat in the corner, or left to stand. He saw brothers and sisters in Christ left destitute of food and clothing, while Christians kept back the wages due them. He saw the members of the church indulging in envy and strife against one another, and all morals relaxed under the plausible excuse of being in the fashion; and in the midst of such Satanic religion he utters his indignant denunciations, and gives the definition of the true: ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ This is the very opposite of the vain and empty religion. It is a religion that has its rise in the heart, that bears the scrutiny of God, that belongs to a soul in sympathy with the sorrowful and in antipathy to the world.

“The second characteristic of true religion is, ‘To keep ourselves unspotted from the world.’ The Bible idea of the world is that it is a dirty thing, not to be meddled with without defilement. Some Christians form a very different notion of it. They think it is lovely, full of sweets, and ‘why shouldn’t they partake of them?’ God contradicts them, and says that the whole style of this world is false and foul. Its politics, its society, its business, its home-habits, are all steeped in pollution. The standard of action everywhere is depraved and vicious. Lying, stealing, and licentiousness lurk under pretty names in all the avenues of worldly life. Such names as shrewdness, business-tact and enterprise, smartness, love of art and grace and beauty, freedom from bigotry, gallantry—these are given to the various devices of selfishness, low cunning, and sensual filth; and so sin by common consent permeates the mass of mankind, refined and unrefined, educated and uneducated alike.

“This the Bible warns us of, and bids us to come out from it all and be entirely separate, as the children of God. It shows us that to touch the unclean thing with our sympathy and conformity, is to daub ourselves with pitch. Christian character is soiled and spoiled by any such contact. We see it glaringly in the lamentable looseness of morals in the way Christians make their money, and a like looseness in the way in which Christians treat the subject of practical purity—initiating their young sons and daughters into the slime of intrigue and immodesty through French novels and lewd operas and semi-nude exhibitions, because, forsooth, high society does it, as if high society was anything else than the devil’s humble servant. How utterly incompatible is all this with Jesus and his pure love! What an infinite distance between this gilded vulgarity and the sublime companionship of the Son of God!

“The Christian is not only to avoid the world, but he is to live so far away from it, that it may not shake any of its filth upon him. Close partnerships with it in any form, are but sure traps to maim and pain the soul. Considerations of money and position are to be left out of view in so great a matter as this, and we must be ready to suffer affliction with the people of God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. Oh! how many fall before this plea of worldly position and success!

“It is a hard plea to resist. A mother has a family of daughters and but scant means. How natural to wink at their going to the theater and frequenting the society of those who make a mock at sin, when wealthy young men seek their society, and visions of large establishments and rich wardrobes fill her brain. A father sees a grand opening for his son in a large and flourishing firm. The members of the firm are notoriously godless, and half their fortune they made by cheating. But what of that? It is too good an opening to be lost. And into it the boy goes, put there by his Christian father, to grow up into the loathsome proportions of a Fisk. Every day these direct defiances of God are ventured on by Christian parents around us. They risk honor and Heaven alike for the glittering bauble, that will rust in their hands. The voice of God comes plainly to his people, ‘Keep yourselves unspotted from the world.’ Be willing to lose all earthly advantages for the sake of Jesus and the truth. Deliberately choose for yourselves and your children poverty and insignificance with a pure heart before God, rather than wealth and honors all tainted with sin—a taint which will never, NEVER, rub out.”

“Brethren, there is no more important subject than this for our city and the church of Christ here. Line upon line and precept upon precept we need, for the whole rush of the torrent is in this direction of ruin. The evil is overrunning our churches. I cannot flatter myself that we are any of us exempt. Oh! for the sake of the pure and blessed Christ—for the sake of your own holiness and happiness—for the sake of your children and their true and lasting welfare—resist the tempter with prayer and determined faith, and exemplify a pure and undefiled religion by visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and keeping yourselves unspotted from the world.”

May the merciful Lord preserve Seventh-day Adventists from any inclination to this popular, formal, soulless worship. The simplicity of Jesus, the power of the Spirit, must be jealously cultivated among us.

D. M. CANRIGHT.