p. 209 | SPIRITUAL VITALITY by Bishop D. W. Clark

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 12, 1881

SPIRITUAL VITALITY.

By Bishop D. W. Clark

WHEN the celebrated Neander was asked the cause of the defection of the German churches from sound doctrine, he replied, “A dead orthodoxy.” There is nothing that can so guard the purity of the Christian faith as spiritual vitality in the church. Alas, for us, when the holy fire ceases to burn upon the altars of our spiritual Israel. We may then have our costly and magnificent edifices of worship, graceful in their proportions, beautiful and imposing in their architecture; their seats may be thronged with refined and wealthy congregations; their vaulted arches may reverberate with the choicest strains of music; the school of human learning may contribute eloquent and refined thought, to feast the intellect and tickle the fancy of the gathered multitude; and the ceremonies of religion be performed with increasing pomp and splendor; but, alas! the whole would want vitality; and under its Lethean influence, souls would be lulled to sleep, and slumber on, till roused by the angry surge rolling up on the dark shores of perdition; the mighty stream of death would lave the very threshold of the sanctuary, and on its bosom multitudes would be borne from the church of God to the gates of hell. May God avert so fearful a calamity from our spiritual Israel!—Bishop D. W. Clark.