MOURNING IN ZION by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 12, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 31.

MOURNING IN ZION.

By Charles Haddon Spurgeon

ANOTHER cause of mourning is when we see the holiness of the visible church beclouded. I trust I am not given to finding fault where fault there is not; but I cannot open my eyes without seeing things done in our churches which thirty years ago were not so much as dreamed of. In the matter of amusements, professors have gone far in the way of laxity. What is worse, the churches have now conceived the idea that it is their duty to amuse the people. Ah, sirs! there may have been a time when Christians were too precise, but it has not been in my day. There may have been such a dreadful thing as Puritanic rigidity, but I have never seen it. We are quite free from that evil now, if it ever existed. We have gone from liberty to libertinism. We have passed beyond the dubious into the dangerous, and none can prophesy where we shall stop.

Moreover, we see in the church that her sacred ardor is cooling. There is still fervor in certain believers, and fervor of the best kind, for the divine Spirit has not utterly departed from us. We have around us Christian men and women who will do and dare anything for Jesus, and bear witness for him in the open street. Thank God for such! They are a standing protest against a lukewarm age. And we have still our gracious young men who will give their lives to bear the name of Christ among the heathen, amid the fevers of the Congo River. Still, things are not in Israel as we could desire. Very seldom are believers now-a-days charged with being fanatical, nor even with being too enthusiastic; and this is a sign that we are below the right heat. There is cause to grieve over many churches and individuals, that they are neither cold nor hot. Let us be personal and practical, and see whether we have not cause to grieve over ourselves in that respect.

There is grave cause for mourning in Zion, because the services of God’s house are neglected. In certain large places of worship, which once were crowded to the door, I hear that there are more pews than people. Where the gospel is gone from the pulpit, listeners soon go from the pews. This is lamentable. How has it come about? I fear that it is very much the case, because if the people did go to many places of worship they could not understand what they would hear; and, what is worse, if they did understand it, it would not be of much use to them. The criticisms of modern thought are of no value to the workingman. If the old gospel is brought to the front in all its simplicity, and preached with fervor, we may hope to see the people back again to hear it; but the task of calling them back is not an easy one. Reverence is dying out; and as surely as it dies, we shall see a fierce attempt at anarchy.

The evil over which I mourn is not only prevalent among the outlying masses, but it taints Christians themselves. Look at your half-Sunday professors, content with only one service, and weary of that! How is it with many Christian people as to meetings for prayer? Prayer-meetings are the very soul of church work, and they bring down the blessing upon all our spiritual agencies; yet they are despised by our high-fliers. This is not only bad in itself, but it is a sign of something worse. Men who can pray to edification are in some directions becoming rare. One pastor told me, the other day, that out of a considerable congregation he found it hard to make up a prayer-meeting at all, because he had so few praying men. It is a dreadful impeachment against the churches, but faithfulness compels me to state it, before things grow still worse. You can get a crowd to a concert, but hardly a dozen to prayer! If there had been a magic-lantern, or a penny reading, or a recitation with comic songs, the pious people would have strained a point to be there; but to pray is much too dull for novel-reading, theater-haunting professors.—C. H. Spurgeon.