THE POPULAR SERMONS

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 8, 1880

THE POPULAR SERMONS

IN the following language the Oakland Daily Times reads a lesson to the ministers who complain of Sunday amusements:—

It is not uncommon for some of our clergymen to occasionally lament that their churches do not appear to be as attractive as the beer gardens and the Sunday picnics. Their invectives against carousals on Sunday would be equally well merited if directed against excesses on any other day of the week. It is not likely that these people would become church-goers if Sunday amusements were prohibited altogether. The churches have lost little or nothing from any defection of that kind. Their diminished congregations are not due to the absence of the thoughtless pleasure-seekers or the participants in public carousals. There is an enormous number of men and women who naturally should be attendants at religious exercises, because they are moral, intelligent and prosperous, but who stay away. When the ministers discover the reason for the indifference, they may adopt an entirely different theory. There must be some powerful and deep seated reason why so many thousands of educated and moral people, of high standing, absent themselves from church. Perhaps it is because the preaching is not adapted to their mental wants. It may be that the sermons are too much like lectures upon public questions on which public opinion is divided. It might be a novelty in some pulpits if there were more of the old-fashioned, orthodox sermons. Some people like the skepticism and vagueness of ministers without a doctrine, but under the name of liberalism, it is finding its way into all of the denominations. If there were more clergymen who adhered to the ancient landmarks of the faith they profess, we believe that their sermons would prove more attractive, even to people who make no religious professions. The knowledge that a sermon is to be upon some of the topics that are under discussion in the newspapers every day, is as apt to repel as to attract an audience. There is far too much cheap preaching, by men who have not the talent or the educational attainments that used to be thought essential. The good men have indulged in a good deal of scolding because the sinners and the sluggards will not listen to them, and the trouble of which they complain is all the while becoming more serious. They might try another experiment: stick closer to the doctrines of their own denominations, let politics alone, and be more discriminating in the admission of future candidates for the sacred calling.