Misshapen Christians by Cuyler

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 12, 1865

Misshapen Christians.

By Cuyler

MR. THEODORE PARKER declared of a great revival in Boston, that a score of such excitements would never close a dram-shop, or liberate a slave. Mr. Parker saw through jaundiced eyes; and yet he caught the shadow of a truth. What was it? Not that Christians have no religion, but that their religion needs to be better distributed over the character. It does not fit them. There is cloth enough, perhaps, in the garment; but here it draws and pinches, and there it bulges out too far to even touch the wearer.

We have in mind, for example, a good brother, who, in some things, is a model. He is orthodox as the Catechism. He is generous in giving. He loves prayer and prayer-meetings; but he has a temper like a bombshell! We have heard it explode in the parlor, and at the dinner-table, to our utter consternation. We remember also a Christian woman, whose good works were carried on night and day at a high pressure. There was hardly a ragged boy in the neighborhood who had not been clothed by her busy fingers. No box went out to any home-missionary personage without its generous contribution from her needle. But her self-will was simply a nuisance to her husband and her friends. Conceited, sour, censorious, squeamish—she seemed to feel that anybody so efficient could afford to be unlovely. What if a machine-shop is a perfect Babel of harsh noises, and a den of ugly Vulcans, all begrimed with oil and dust—provided the establishment turns out good work? She considered herself a sort of spiritual machine-shop.

Now, why do Christians make this sorry figure of mingled beauty and deformity, like statues finished half by a sculptor, and half by a stone-mason; or trees loaded with foliage and fruit on the one side, and gnarled and blasted on the other? If we only were creatures of a normal growth and development, doubtless either good or evil would wholly pervade us. There would be no mixture. When angels ceased to be angels, they became devils. A healthy, vigorous body digests a poison, and sends it with quick pulsations through the arteries, to envenom every limb. A diseased, enfeebled circulation leaves it in the stomach, to gangrene and inflame. So too with the mind. Some men have a logical straight-forwardness that

darts right on from the premises to its conclusion. Their chain of reasoning flashes, like chain-lightning, in an instant through its length. They can hardly imbibe an error without becoming all error. But many a good soul, short-sighted, logically and self-contradictory, will hold a truth and a deadly heresy, lying snugly side by side—the peacefulest bedfellows in the world. "If it were not for the blessed inconsistencies in the logic of our Arminian brethren," Dr. Taylor, of New Haven, used to say, "we should have to give them up as sheer infidels."

But what is the remedy for all the distortion in Christian lives? "More religion," many reply. But more religion, merely, will never answer. The fact is that genuine piety, true love to God, may go on increasing, and yet hardly touch these strange self-contradictions. The Baptist Watchman and Reflector declared, just after the great revivals of 1857, that there were, at that time, more dissensions and bickerings in their churches, than almost ever before. And, worse than that, this mischief was brewing in the very churches which had largely shared in the great awakening. And, worse than that, the ferment began, often, in the very midst of the revival itself! Probably churches of every sect might make the same confession.

Look South for another example. Say what you will, and however truly, of the spuriousness of pro-slavery religion, no candid man will deny that they have genuine churches in the rebel States, and that some of those churches have enjoyed genuine seasons of special grace. But with what effect on the hideous iniquities of slavery? Take that whole Southern horizon, in imagination, into one view; and you have a grand vision, grotesque and horrible—hymn-books and whips, hallelujahs and screams, prayer-meetings and auctions for "niggers," young converts going into the church, and long coffles going into the slave-pen.

The difficulty in all the instances we have cited is not chiefly the want of religion. It is the want of a special application and enforcement of religion on the special sin of the church or individual. We have gone on the false assumption that religion, once received, would apply itself. We have expected that, in its liquid flow, it would diffuse itself through all the channels of the soul; as it would in any warm, generous nature uncursed by depravity. We have forgotten that the coldness of a sinner's nature chills the stream to a sluggish current, that stops while half the channels yet are dry.

The good brother we mentioned, with the explosive temper, apparently never thought of bringing his religion to bear on that infirmity. The redoubtable sister, with her bustling charities and her ugly will, asked God for everything but the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit. The churches, in the great revival, were more anxious to save souls than to temper their zeal with love. Southern Christians trained the guns of their rebuke upon every unpopular sin, shooting clear of the hydra-heads of slavery. Here, too, belonged the shallow sophisms of the New York American Tract Society, that Christianity, carried to the South, would somehow apply itself to slavery, without any unpleasant necessity of running the risk of tar and feathers, or a "hempen necklace," by any more special allusion to that disagreeable subject.

Now there are disciples who, it may be with no more sincerity or self-denial than the one-sided Christians we have alluded to, have a rounded and admirable beauty of character. Take them in any state of fortune or misfortune, turn them upside down and over and over with agitations and calamities; and somehow, like a kaleidoscope, they will come up as orderly and beautiful as ever! The reason is plain. They carry their religion around the whole scope of their character, bringing the whole equally under its power. They "grow up into Him in all things which is the Head, even Christ." . . .

A few years since, a good deacon in a town in Massachusetts offered a tract to a mechanic whom he found strolling about on the Sabbath. The man turned it over, noticed the imprint of the same society to which we have already alluded, and flung it behind him, crying, "Confound the cowardly craft! I won't sail under that flag!" Now the officers of that society were better men than this Sabbath-breaker. But, nevertheless, at the point of contact with him, they were weaker than he. He held to a bold rebuke of a giant evil, in spite of its popularity. He stood, as to that, on higher ground than they, and he knew it. Thank God, they have come to a better wisdom. "Let the dead past bury its dead."

We need more religion in every church and every heart. But if we can learn to make the best use of what religion we already have, the gain will be immeasurable! We want a balanced character, every grace holding every other in counterpoise. We want the circle of virtues complete. A break in it is like a break in the magic circle of the old astrologers, letting in some demon unawares. We want to remember that doing good is a small matter compared with being good.—Cuyler.