WORLDLY CONFORMITY

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 11, 1893

WORLDLY CONFORMITY.

OUR [American Baptist] “down grade” is along the lines of worldly conformity. That pure, earnest, simple piety that characterized our fathers is not as popular as it once was. Christians resort to the theater, patronize races, neglect public worship, indulge in card playing, as if these things were not at all inconsistent with devout life. And these things are only symptoms. They bespeak the condition of the system. As blotches on the face or pains about the body are symptoms of more desperate disease, so these worldly pleasures are symptoms of disease in the Christian life of the church. “A game of cards will not harm anybody,” we are told. Nor will a blotch on the face, if that is all. What does the blotch indicate? It may be the telltale sign which shows something within that will kill. The card-playing, theater-going, dancing, mirth-seeking of Christians may be the signs of a consumption the end of which is death to piety. It is so easy to say, “It is no harm.” It is so easy to ask, “What injury can it do?” We deceive ourselves by ignoring the fact that the symptoms cover and conceal the real disease.

When Whitfield came to America, he found a worldly conformity that alarmed him. He knew that it was but the symptom of rottenness of Christian life. He felt sure that it would breed death in the end. What came out of it?—Why, the Unitarian apostasy, which carried the churches of the old orthodox faith of New England over to a denial of Christ, a rejection of the atonement, and a sacrifice of the cardinal doctrines of the gospel. The worldliness of a hundred years ago

was planted in the hollow, half-way covenant, and it ripened into Unitarianism, which threatened to blight the religious life of the whole continent.

There are some things that always ripen into harvest. Thistles will reproduce themselves, and one thistle bunch will plant a whole field. Worldliness is of the thistle tribe. It grows rank and luxuriant. It will overgrow a family and overrun a whole church. It is as hard to fight, and as difficult to exterminate, as a crop of thistles.

The revival most needed is in the church—a revival of spirituality, Christian life and non-conformity to the world, a reformation that will make men honest, truthful, reliable, and God fearing. Revivals that add nothing to the strength or spirituality of the church are open to grave suspicion.—Christian Inquirer.