Worldliness of the Age.
By Dr. S. I. Prime
PHILIP HAMERTON has a chapter in his book on "Human Intercourse," in which he tries to account for the fact that people are becoming less religious than they once were. And he finds the reason to be that with the increase of knowledge and feeling, now so fully and variously developed, men and women are absorbed with the many concerns that arts and science have suggested, and are not shut up, as formerly, to religious thought and pursuit. That seems to me a very circuitous way of saying that things secular have excluded the spiritual from the minds of the people, and is merely saying the same thing over again. When the New Testament was written, the same expressions are employed that we must use to state the fact that the present usurps the mind and heart, that is, the intellect and affections, to the exclusion of the unseen and eternal. The age is worldly. And when was it not worldly? What were they doing when Noah entered into the ark? They were buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, eating, drinking, and having "a good time" each in his own way. And what else are they doing now? What other things were going on in the days of the wise king Solomon? Theaters and plays, men singers and women singers, games and shows, traffic and exchange, building and decorating, cheating and stealing, office-seeking and embezzlements, all just the same as it is now. Human nature is the same, and like begets like all the world over and always, as it was and as it will be. In those days there were also thoughtful old men who shook their heads at the frivolities and fashionable follies, as well as the wide-spread worldliness, greed, and crime of the times, and sighing said, "The former days were better than these." And the voice of inspiration rebuked those croakers, telling them they were mistaken in their judgment. In the varying conditions of human life from age to age, great changes may be noted in the manifestation of thought and feeling. The taste of one generation may not be as that of the one before it. The fashion of this world passeth away, and other fashions succeed. Religious experience varies in its development, while the truth and facts are the same to-day and forever. Seasons of religious revival are not invariably attended with the same manifestations. I remember "exercises" considered essential to sound conversion fifty years ago that are very rare now. Then the heart must be plowed up and harrowed for the implanting of saving grace. So it must be now; but the process is not the same, and the display of emotion is not so phenomenal and pronounced. There are diversities of operations by the same Spirit. The gate into the kingdom is the same needle's eye, but the strife, the conflict, and the victory are not so demonstrative. But here is the point to be made, that gate must be passed, or the Master himself, and all his apostles who took up his words, were mistaken as to the way to be saved. To miss it, to lose the opportunity, to make an infinite failure, wreck, and ruin of the soul, it is not necessary to become a pirate or a dynamiter. These are the two classes of men who come nearest in nature to the dwellers in everlasting fire. But it is not important to be like them in order to find the gate shut when you want to get in. Just stay where you are. Do only what you are now doing. Float along down the stream of a cheerful life. Eat, drink, and be merry. Buy, sell, build, plant, pray. Do that and that only, and you will never get into the kingdom of Heaven. Glory, honor, and eternal life will not drop into your hands like ripe fruit. You must be up and doing something proportioned, at least in a faint degree, to the value of that you would obtain. This is a short sermon for the times. When I see the pushing and pulling, the scramble and rush, the wear and tear of body and soul, now going on, and so much the more as the day approaches when the door will be shut against all applicants, I am amazed at the madness or folly of full-grown men who seek to move heaven and earth that they may "eat the king's bread." The greatest of men, whose loftiest ambitions have been gratified, still found an aching void within, which no power nor place could fill. "Vanity and vexation" is the legend on the scroll of fame. Yet I would not despise the wealth of good there is in riches, power, position, fame. A right mind may justly desire them. But they are not the good, and there is something better than any of them or all combined. Seek first the kingdom of God. Make sure of it. Seek it with all the heart. Get into it and be safe. Then all else you need will be yours also.