Christian Activity to be Aroused.
By Editor
[We believe that an important prophecy has of late years been fulfilled in the nominal churches of the land, [Rev. xiv, 8.] to which they are from time to time unconsciously bearing testimony. The readers of the REVIEW will understand the following "Circular Letter of the Washtenaw Mich. Baptist Association," which we copy from the Mich. Christian Herald—Ed. REVIEW] In asking you to review with us the present aspects of the Christian cause, it is not our purpose to stir you to a new burst of grief over a languishing church, or to retail again with a useless sorrow, the story of the declensions of modern piety. Too well, already do we all know how the foul tides of fashion and folly have swept to the very altar-places of our faith, and too surely and strongly do we all feel, in our own hearts, the awful power of an over-active age which hurries us so remorselessly away from the places of holy contemplation and prayer, and plunges us into the whirling vortices of worldly care. It is rather to the fruits of this long night of declension—this sleep of the churches—that our thoughts now turn. Our Lord, in one of the most significant and instructive of his parables, says that "while men slept the enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat." In these few words there is the whole history of heresy and the various forms of unbelief and sin that have sprung up to pervert or plague the Christian church. When the Christian sowers have slept over their work, then has Satan sown the tares of scepticism and sin—broadcast has he preached, even through the church and over the whole field of the Christian enterprise, the corrupting "doctrine of devils." It is not merely the loss of Christian enjoyment and the kindred progress of the cause of Christ we are called to mourn over as the bitter fruits of this apathy. A great and terrible tide of worldly and Satanic influence sweeps us farther and farther from the shores of truth and heaven, out into the wild and stormy ocean of sin, as soon as we lay down our oars. The unused muscle withers speedily into weakness and deadly decay; the unused harp-string mildews till it can never wake again to melody; so the unexercised faith and benevolence of our churches is fast wasting into impotency and hopeless decay. Like the ancient hero prophet, while the church has reclined its head and slept in the lap of a Delilah-like world, it has been shorn of its locks of glory and strength and now the Philistines mock at its blind impotency. Nor has the evil paused within the pale of the church. As we have already stated, while the church has slept her enemies have sown tares. The times are rife with the growth of a giant ungodliness, which could never have taken root had the churches been active and flourishing. Infidelity abounds. Hiding itself under new forms, and even arrogating to itself the titles of a purer and more progressive Christianity, it is luring many to its foul and fatal embrace. Pretending to more purity and benevolence than the church possesses, it claims the leadership in reforms, and heaps its feigned contempt upon a Christianity whose wholesome conservatism it impatiently stigmatizes as fogyism. Especially does it riot in the most impious form of irreligion known as Spiritualism. Leaguing itself with evil spirits, whether in the body or out of the body, we know not, it attempts to supercede the Bible by a pretended newer revelation, and would by its Satanic show of signs and wonders, deceive, if possible, the very elect. Its leaders, everywhere, are men known a few years ago for their bold and unblushing infidelity. Its advocates boast of more than 60,000 adherents, and its orators have even invaded the pulpit with their horrible rhapsodies. We cannot too seriously entreat you, dear brethren, to avoid all enticements to visit these unhallowed "circles." Rebuke steadily these attempts to establish communication with the spirits of the dead. "When they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep and mutter, should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?" Isa. viii, 19. Do not be deceived by the apparent religiousness of some of these "communications;" all experience testifies that they will increase unto more ungodliness. Intemperance, that mother vice, and nurse of all sins, is another of these tares of iniquity which has taken new root while Christian men have slept. Its ravages have been afresh, and thousands of our youth are yielding to its deadly seductions. Taking advantage of the lull in the voice of Christian rebuke which once sent it hiding in darkness and secrecy, it again stalks in open day, and young men are seen staggering in the street who a year or two since would have blushed to enter the grog shop. Entrenched deeply behind the great pecuniary and political interests it subserves, it laughs at law, and borrows new attractiveness from the countenance of law-makers. Nothing but an aroused Christian philanthropy, arming itself in the name and spirit of Christ, can save our land from witnessing anew all the old horrors of intemperance. Nor must we pass, in this glance at the consequences of the feeble piety of the times, the decline of family government and of the wholesome instruction of the young. A living Christianity has ever been ready, like its divine Author, to take little children in its arms and bless them. Educational institutions, the natural out-growth of a religion which teaches the high value and destiny of the human soul, have ever found their truest friends and supporters among the truly pious. Not only have the donations to endow our colleges, and high schools come mostly from Christian men, but they are Christian families which furnish the large majority of students for these institutions. Well may we feel therefore, the influence of the decline of vital religion, upon the cause of sound education. And who does not see that while the intellect of the nation was never receiving a more vigorous culture, the great heart is left untouched for good; that while the forms and sad facts of education—its "knowledge"—abound in a peerless profusion, the high moral inculcations the Christian aims and purposes, and the enhanced reverence for God and duty which lead to education all its refining and saving power, are almost entirely wanting. It is not that they may work for God and humanity that our youth are now educated, but that they may work more effectually for themselves. But it is especially in the family, the great primary school of the world that this evil influence has produced its worst effects. The home circle is almost an obsolete term, and the lack of a holy home influence is apparent everywhere. The increase of lawlessness and crime among the young has excited the painful remark of hundreds who have not paused to inquire "what enemy hath done it."194 Look around you, and note how few of the children of Christian parents are of late converted. The promised blessings of faith have almost ceased to be "to you and your children." Paternal solicitude for the conversion of children is swallowed up in a solicitude for gaining them an earthly hope and inheritance, and the "nurture and admonition of the Lord" has given way to the more popular nurture and admonition of mammon. Christian parents, permit us to admonish you that no grander or holier duty rests upon you than to care for the souls of your children. With almost unlimited authority and influence over them, God may well demand their souls at your hands, and the world will hold you accountable for the characters they bear. Oh! how would a large revival of our piety, dear brethren, be felt in our houses and families! How would living, zealous and active churches throughout the land, send their influence thrilling to the very centre of the seats of learning, and lead out to the service of God many a noble mind which will now waste its powers in the service of sin! How would all the business of education, even in the common schools, be made to bear holy fruits, if a prevailing absorbing piety reigned through the communities around them! Time will forbid us to go now through the whole field of our Christian life and labor, and to show how, everywhere, the tares are springing while Zion sleeps. Happy are we, brethren, if our own hearts do not each hold some vile seed of worldliness growing rank and high where the plants of grace should flourish and the fruits of the spirit ripen. Eternity will reveal what giant moral and social evils have taken root, how slavery and drunkenness and every hurtful lust have waxed strong in the land during this long slumber of the church. We do not, in a spirit of obstinate despondency, overlook the great Christian enterprises of these latter days,—the noble Christian missions which have awakened the songs of salvation on the remotest heathen shores. A grand and truthful testimony do they bear to the divine and comprehensive spirit of love dwelling in our holy religion. But even these magnificent charities languish under the general blight. Every year, their troubled cry for help tells too truly how feeble is their hold upon the churches. Dear brethren, we cannot close this fraternal cry of warning without indicating, briefly the cause and cure of this long apathy, whose consequences, as we have shown, are full of such frightful importance to the children of God and the world at large. The cause lies not in any general sluggishness existing in the minds of men. Never were the activities of the human race more fully aroused than now. No field of thought or work is left uncultivated by the keen intellect and iron will of the age. The huge earth comes daily more within the grasp of the human hand, and its subtlest agencies have been harnessed as horses to the car, and sent across continents and oceans to bear his message of trade. It is this very activity of the age that has led to the results we deplore. The minds of men are called off from the old themes of thought and conversation, and hurried to new and, falsely so called, more practical things. Christians no longer sit by their firesides, as of old, and debate the high doctrines of election, the sonship and divinity of Christ, the atonement and relations of faith and repentance and regeneration. The Christian mind has been diverted from the deep and ever needful heart-work of self-examination, and the prayerful struggle for purity of heart and assurance of faith, and led to expend its forces in external activities. Gradually it has fallen asleep to the great spiritual facts around it, and losing faith in the grand spiritual forces belonging to the church, it has sought to supply their place by the power of money and worldly policy. The decay of faith has unknit the bonds of hope, and loosened the urgency of prayer. Thus while "the form of godliness" remains "the power thereof" is fatally lacking. It is a Christianity with the Christ left out—a magnificent divine machinery with the omnipotent motive power lost, and which we are striving in vain to run by hand. It is far easier, brethren, to prescribe the remedy for this deep and slumberous apathy, than to enforce its use. The cause itself, of the disorder, indicates the cure. "Awake, thou that sleepest!" says a divine voice, "arise from the dead and Christ shall give thee light." Even a child will tell you that to "repent and do the first works" is the simple remedy for all backsliding. But in seeking to return to the old paths it must be avoided as a fatal error that we are to seek merely the renewal of old experience. Not to regain the piety we have lost, but to realize the full, pure, perfect piety of the Bible, must be our aim. The reform must be radical or it will be useless. Not to do better than we have done, but to do all things commanded us, must be the mark for our efforts. True Christianity claims that the whole life shall be religious; that the life of Jesus with all its holiness and humility, its constant self-denial and disregard of worldly wealth or honor shall be the one pattern for every Christian man. No reform therefore, can be blest of God that does not aim to meet these claims of the gospel in all their length and breadth. We need then a revival of the full Bible Christianity—a Christianity that counts "that the friendship of the world is enmity with God," and holds him who affiliates with the world and serves for its rewards, or seeks to enjoy its pleasures or honors, traitorous to the Saviour whom that world crucified. We want, brethren, a revival which shall change our religion to our fields and homes, our shops and stores with the same binding obligation as to the sanctuary or closet; that shall animate us with its consecrating love and faith when we visit or work, or buy or sell, when we eat or travel, as when we pray or preach or die. We want a conscience that shall rebuke every manifestation of unchristian temper or uncontrolled appetite, every fretful word or impatient wish or unholy desire, and "bring every thought into captivity to the will of Christ." We want a holiness that shall shine at the fireside, a mercifulness that shall extend to the brutes, a piety that shall overcome the world with all its awful power, and make us to exhibit here on earth, amidst all its difficulties and discouragements, the very temper and spirit of heaven. Finally, dear brethren, let us pray that God will again, as in the days of Luther and Whitfield, and Bunyan and Edwards, lift up afresh a standard against the enemy that is come in upon us as a flood. Let judgment begin at the house of God. Let every one of us heed for himself the admonition, Watch and pray, and every one for himself seek a speedy victory over that dread trinity of sin, the World, the Flesh and the Devil.—Circular Letter Washtenaw Association.