p. 8 | Unwilling to Be Warned by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 18, 1912

Unwilling to Be Warned

By C. M. S.

THE backslidden church behaves much like the backslidden individual. It prefers to stay where it is. The Lord, speaking through Jeremiah, says even of Babylon: “We would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed.” She did not wish to be healed. She did not realize that she had been wounded unto death. She preferred to go on in the way of her own carnal desires. So the Lord was compelled to abandon her.

Just so it will be with the “daughters of Babylon” in the last days—the creed-bound, world-loving churches. The Lord will be compelled to leave them to their own ruin, even as he was compelled to leave the great mother in ages past. Occasionally one of the Lord’s servants speaks out in warning. A few may hear; but the pleasure-loving throng press on, and not infrequently they seek to hush the voice that sought to warn them.

An instance of this kind is witnessed in the setting aside of Bishop Foster, of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He did not take a roseate view of the spiritual conditions in that church body, and in the hope of bringing the church-members to a sense of their true condition, he published a warning in one of the organs of the denomination. There is food for thought in what the bishop said to his fellow church-members; and the fact that he was set aside when he had uttered his warning, makes the hopelessness of the condition all the more apparent. He said:—

“The church of God is to-day courting the world. Its members are trying to bring it down to the level of the ungodly. The ball, the theater, nude and lewd art, social luxuries, with all their loose moralities, are making inroads into the sacred enclosure of the church; and as a satisfaction for all this worldliness, Christians are making a great deal of Lent and Easter and Good Friday and church ornamentation. It is the old trick of Satan. The Jewish church struck on that rock, the Romish Church was wrecked on the same, and the Protestant church is fast reaching the same doom.

“Our great dangers, as we see them, are assimilation to the world, neglect of the poor, substitution of the form for the fact of godliness, abandonment of discipline, a hireling ministry, an impure gospel, which, summed up, is a fashionable church. That Methodists should be liable to such an outcome, and that there should be signs of it a hundred years from the “sail-loft,” seems almost the miracle of history; but who that looks about him to-day can fail to see the fact? . . .

“Formerly every Methodist attended class, and gave testimony of experimental religion. Now the class-meeting is attended by very few, and is, in many churches, abandoned. Seldom the stewards, trustees, and leaders of the church attend class. Formerly nearly every Methodist prayed, testified, or exhorted in prayer-meeting. Now but very few are heard. . . . Worldly socials, fairs, festivals, concerts, and such like, have taken the place of the religious gatherings, revival meetings, class- and prayer-meetings of earlier days.

“How true that the Methodist discipline is a dead letter! Its rules forbid the wearing of gold or pearls or costly array; yet no one ever thinks of disciplining its members for violating them. They forbid the reading of such books and the taking of such diversions as do not minister to godliness, yet the church itself goes to shows and frolics and festivals and fairs, which destroy the spiritual life of the young as well as of the old. The extent to which this is now carried on is appalling. The spiritual death it carries in its train will be known only when the millions it has swept into hell stand before the judgment.”

Now, this bishop’s statement of conditions in his own church is just as true of the other large church bodies in general. It is the real condition of the great church world to-day—a form of godliness with the power lacking, and the zeal and love that once were so evident now waxing cold, while the easy professor turns to pleasures and pursuits of his own liking. Seeing the conditions as they exist now, and knowing that they are divinely foreshown as indications of the last days, how can the child of God turn to the allurements of the world, and refuse to believe that the coming of our Saviour draws nigh? We must heed the warnings, we must press the battle to the gates, we must divest ourselves of every clog of selfishness, every tie that would bind us to the service of the world.

“The world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.”