WORLDLINESS by Arthur Tappan Pierson

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 14, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 11.

WORLDLINESS.

By Arthur Tappan Pierson

Activity there may be without real efficiency. Principal Forsyth says of much of our “religious bustle” that it is “narcotic; it is chosen as the easier way—taken up to evade the arduous concentration of spiritual toil.” Worldliness may be disguised, but it is none the less destructive of holiness. The church must be in the world as the ship in the sea, but as the sea can not be in the ship without sinking it, the world must not be in the church.

And the spirit of the world is so subtle; it is like an odor or a savor that invisibly hangs about and clings to what it pervades. We carry it with us even when we praise and pray and engage in nominal work for Christ. But, tho so ethereal and evasive, it weighs us down, as ballast does a balloon; and as Dr. McLaren says, “A general unloading of the thick clay would leave thousands to soar to heights they never reach.”—A. T. Pierson.