SALT WITHOUT SAVOR

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 3, 1878

SALT WITHOUT SAVOR.

The following paragraph speaks particularly of religious progress in the Presbyterian Church; but this may probably be taken as a fair standard for all other denominations. It presents a sad picture, from which it is becoming painfully evident that the type of revivalism now prevailing in the land is not leading to any permanent religious growth. The time has come for the last reform upon the law of God, and the stirring testimony of the final fulfillments of God’s word; and any revival that ignores these things, cannot produce any lasting good. It is salt without savor. Men can never become strong enough to stand up against the evils of this time, fed on emotion alone. The paragraph is quoted in The Advance from the Evangelist, as follows:—

“The Chicago correspondent of the Evangelist, studying the Minutes of the Presbyterian Church, gathers these very significant items: ‘Fourteen hundred and seventeen of the five thousand churches, received last year on confession an average of less than two each. These churches, with few exceptions, are reported as regularly supplied with preaching, and they have an aggregate membership of about 150,000. One hundred and two churches regularly ministered to, and having an aggregate of twenty thousand members (an average of more than two hundred each), had an average of a little more than one addition on confession of faith to each church. Eighty-three churches, regularly supplied, and having an average membership of more than one hundred and fifty, report no additions. Three hundred and twenty-two churches which have stated preaching, and a membership of no less than twenty-five nor more than one hundred, report no additions. Nine hundred and sixty-two churches are reported vacant. Many of these, doubtless, are supplied with preaching irregularly, and some regularly, since they are among our strongest churches; but six hundred and eighty-one of them report no additions. Here there are more than twelve hundred of our churches from which the report comes of no additions by conversion, and one hundred others in which the conversions are a little more than one each, and fourteen hundred others in which the conversions have averaged about two each. As the writer adds: ‘These figures are certainly suggestive; but of what? Of the failure of the gospel, as infidels freely charge, or of the failure of its preachers through unfaithfulness? Certainly not the former, and probably not wholly the latter.’”