THE DECLINE OF SPIRITUALITY IN THE CHURCH.
Among the unpleasant reflections which the reading of Bishop Hurst’s “History of the Reformation” will be apt to awaken in many minds is that there has been a great decline in the spirituality of the church. In those days religious earnestness was at its maximum; we seem to be passing through a period when it is at a minimum. How far the seeming is accurate, it may not be easy to determine; but appearances are against the modern church. All our religious services lack in spirituality. The lack is in the sermon, the song, the prayer. Family religion has apparently little of the intense power of the former days. The conversation of Christians is less frequently on religious subjects. We are carefully weeding out of familiar speech the old references to Providence, Death and Judgment. We fall into silence when one among us introduces such themes. Religious feeling and expression have disappeared from the surface of our life in a most astonishing way. We are not made, the unconverted are not made, to feel the force and warmth of religious conviction. The sermons are logical, literary and cold; if there be warmth, it seems to be rather intellectual than religious. The more able religious editors complain that they can not get written for them articles which are at once readable and spiritual; while other editors condemn any articles of that type as savoring of a “dreary religiosity;” and others say that the expression of religious experience has “hopelessly gone into the keeping of cranks and weak-headed and morally-unsound persons.” One man says: “I can imagine nothing sweeter to hear than religious experience ought to be; but when I listen to it I hear either out-worn phrases or senseless fanaticism; and these have been driven from the respectable churches and are monopolized by ignorant egotists in the out-of-the-way corners of the country.”
A partial explanation of the facts lies in the statement just quoted. But it is very partial. Why should fanatical zeal kill genuine earnestness? If we think and feel earnestly in religion, why do we not talk of what is burning in our hearts, as the fathers did, in language of our own? A round of set phrases does denote vacancy of spirit, but the earnest spirit is not banished from our heart by the formalism of another’s speech. It may be pleaded for us that we are in a transition state; that the Reformation did develop a form of earnestness, and that our earnestness can not work in that harness and is reverently silent because appropriate speech is wanting. But why do not hundreds of ministers who have all gifts of intellect utter spiritual thought and emotion? Why are they forever dealing rather with opinions than facts of the spiritual life? We ask such questions in no censorious spirit; they are pressed home to many anxious hearts, and the wonder grows whether modern Christianity is tongueless respecting its experience because it is backslidden and even skeptical. We could frame, as has often been done, explanations; but we still doubt whether they really explain. The spiritual activity is of all inner motions the one least likely to lose all power to express itself.
It is true that a vast body of believers have the spirit of giving and of work. They make noble offerings, they teach the children in Sunday-schools, they make sacrifices of time and ease and money to carry on churches. In these things no former generation had so glorious a record. It is probably true that this vast body of believers contains as large a proportion as any Reformation body of persons who would die for their faith. It can not be said of such a body of persons that faith is not in it. Making all allowances for conventionality and religious fashion, there remains proof enough that the modern church believes. Nor can we doubt its spiritual poverty. It is poor in the divine life. This state of things can not last. We are in a condition where faith must fail if love does not come to the rescue. The greatest of all revivals may be at the door. The church wants nothing but vital godliness—experience of divine things. It has so much of zeal, benevolence, self-sacrifice, philanthropy, that we can not so much as hint at despair. Is it possible that some of our philanthropies are too consuming and exhaust us? If we will stop to think and take account of ourselves, we shall probably find that we lack spirituality because we do not want it. That discovery may be the one thing needed to arouse us to strenuous spiritual endeavor.