Revivalism and Spiritual Decline
REV. DR. VAN DYKE, pastor of the Clinton avenue Presbyterian church, Brooklyn, denies in the Christian at Work the claim of certain men who "suppose they have a special calling to promote and conduct revivals," and declares that "this claim is the root of all the evils connected with our present system. There is no such office in the church of Christ, and no room for such an office as what is now generally understood by the work of an 'evangelist' or 'revivalist.' . . . Growing out of this assumption of an office which does not exist in the church, is the fact that our revivals, especially in our great cities, are generally conducted in such a way as to educate the people away from the house of God. Why is it when the note of revival is sounded there is such a disposition to forsake our churches with their sacred associations and rush into a theatre, or public hall, or some place extemporized for the purpose? . . . This education of the people away from the house and ordinances of God, teaching them to look for saving influences to men who are here to-day and gone to-morrow, and to means which appeal to the love of novelty, and are necessarily of short duration, is carried on in many ways which there is not the time to mention, and the whole system, as embodied in these methods, carries in it the seeds of spiritual death. This explains, in part, the lamentable fact that a revival is so often the precursor of spiritual death and indifference. It goes very far to solve the problem why, in less than five years after what was regarded by many as the greatest of all revivals, when so many of our churches were emptied into the hippodrome and so many of our ministers sat silent, while one man, who is not a minister, did the work of an Evangelist, there is to-day, a universal complaint of spiritual deadness."