THE PULPIT CULT.
In the days of our Saviour the rich man of Jerusalem would, on a Sabbath morning, bathe and anoint his body, and putting on fine linen and wearing-apparel, move in a dignified fashion to the synagogue, feeling that he was serving God by making God respectable in the eyes of men.
The proneness of poor human nature to lose in the mere form that for which the form was created to serve is the same throughout the world, and through all the ages, evolution to the contrary notwithstanding. As our physical being is, and has been, and will ever be about the same, our spiritual suffers little change. When Adam and Eve, leaving the garden of Eden, encountered the typhoid fever, that dread disease had the same symptoms, made the same progress to death or recovery, that puzzles the physicians to-day. That horrible but curious growth we call cancer was the same six thousand years ago that it is in this nineteenth century. The sicknesses of the soul are the same in all climes and in the presence of all creeds.
Said a witty ordained infidel who preached the salvation of unbelief many years at London, on visiting a business men’s prayer meeting: “Our merchants may not be Jews in their dealings, but they are certainly Hebrews in their prayers.”
The form has survived the substance. We have retained the customs and phraseology, while losing the meaning. As the rich men of Jerusalem who on the Sabbath thronged the Temple and were solemnly earnest in their prayers, returned to their cheating the day after, so we give unto God one-seventh part of our time and devote the rest to the practices of Satan. We are full of wrath and disgust at the Sunday-school cashier who appropriates the money of other people and, unable longer to conceal his thefts, flees to Canada. This is unjust. The poor man was not less pious than his president or his directors who neglected their duties and in many cases shared in the luxury. His crime was not in what he did, but in being caught at it before he could carry out his intent to replace the funds from his successful speculations. He saw in the leaders of his little congregation in the Lord, millionaires who had made all they possessed through fraud, and why should he, with the best intentions, not accumulate a modest competence through the same means? He heard nothing to the contrary from the pulpit. The eloquent divine told, in winning words, of the righteousness of right and the sinfulness of sin, but the illustrations were all, or nearly all, two thousand years old, and the words were the words of Isaiah and the prophets. To denounce the sins of to-day in “the vulgar tongue” would be to offend the millionaires of the congregation and lessen the salary of the worthy divine.
The late Chief Justice Chase once startled the writer of this by saying: “The wicked men are not in the penitentiary, they are in the churches. The criminals we convict are not wicked, they are simply weak—weak in character and weak in intellect. The men from whom society suffers are the cold, selfish, calculating creatures who not only keep clear of the courts but seek the churches, and deceive others as they deceive themselves and hope to deceive the Almighty.”
Sin is never so dangerous as when it gets to be respectable. The sanction of law, whether it gets to be such through custom or legal enactment, so nearly resembles the order of God that we accept it as such, and if it furthers our selfish greed we take it gladly.
The moral code, like that of municipal law, is made up of a few simple rules, easily understood, and the trouble comes in on the practice of the one and the application of the other. That church is divine which subordinates the rule to the practice, and has works as well as faith to testify to its commission. That is the true religion which leaves the sanctuary with the believer, and is with him at all hours, eats at his table, sleeps in his bed, and accompanies him to his labor. It never leaves him alone.
How we have separated the two, the precept from practice, this pulpit cult bears evidence. The high-toned infidel and lofty agnostic sneer at the humble Catholic who, in deepest contrition, confesses his sins to his spiritual adviser and goes forth relieved, probably to fall again. How much better it is to attend divine worship one day in seven, put on a grave countenance, and listen to eloquent discourses, more eloquent prayers, and heavenly music, and then go out with no thought of religion until the next Sunday returns for a like performance!
Two thirds of what comes under the head of moral conduct in one is pure selfishness. A man may be honest in his dealing, honorable in his conduct, a good citizen, a loving husband, and an affectionate father, and yet be without kindness, charity, faith, hope—in a word, all that brought Christ upon earth in His mission of peace.
One summer and autumn we lived at a mountain resort on the line of a great railroad. We saw, day after day, long lines of cattle-cars crowded with their living freight in a three-hundred-mile pull of intensest agony. The poor beasts were jammed against each other, unable to lie down,—to get under the hoofs of the others was death,—fighting, hungry, in the last stages of thirst, panting with tongues protruded, and their beautiful eyes staring with that expression of wild despair which the scent of blood brings to them, they rolled on to their far-off slaughter-houses with moans that were heart-breaking.
It was our fortune that same autumn to meet one of the cattle-merchants at church. He was there with his family. A stout, middle-aged man of eminent respectability, he was a church-member, and looked up to as a model citizen. We saw him listening to the eloquent sermon, and wondered if there were not a low, deep undertone of agony running through 238 the discourse. When the prayers were offered up he knelt humbly, and covered his face with his hands. Did they shut out the wild, despairing eyes of those suffering beasts?
Yet how amazed would that estimable citizen have been had his minister said to him: “You are railroading your soul to hell. Every moan of those tortured animals goes up to God for record. You are freighting disease to great cities, and the fevers and death are yet to be answered for by you—wretched sinner!”
There is not a fashionable church in any city of our land that has not within gunshot of its door great masses of starving, sinful, poverty-stricken humanity. Crowded into tenement-houses, from the damp cellars to the hot garrets, they make one wonder, not that they die, but that they live. No eloquent discourse on the righteousness of right and the sinfulness of sin; no well-balanced sentences of prayers, sent up on perfumed air to our heavenly Father; no deep-toned thunder set to music in hymns, ever reach their ears, or could, if they did, carry consolation to the sorrowful, or curing to the sick. And yet, from marble pulpits to velvet-cushioned pews, the work goes on.
We beg pardon: it does not go on. The well-meaning divines complain of non-attendance. They are startled by the fact that not one-tenth of our population of sixty millions are really attending church-members. What can be done to popularize the pulpit? There is but one way, and that is to make the people desire to attend. Time was when the great truths of Christianity were new to the human race. The multitudes were eager to hear of the revelation, and the Church sent out its missionaries to preach and teach mankind. So far as a knowledge of these truths is concerned, the civilized people have been taught. There is not a criminal in jail to-day but knows more theology than St. Paul. The people are weary of this everlasting thrash of theological chaff. The civilized world is fairly saturated with preaching, which has come to be stale, flat, and in every sense unprofitable.
Instead of asking the people to come to the church, let the church go to the people. This is the secret of the sneers attending the Catholic faith. There is, with it, very little preaching, but a great deal of practice. Its orphan asylums, its homes for the aged poor, its hospitals, to say nothing of its great body of devoted priests and holy sisters of charity, tell why it is that its temples are thronged, and its conversions almost miraculous.
It is a grave error to suppose that true religion is to be advanced through the intellect. It makes its appeal to the heart. If it is not a refuge to the woful wayfarers of earth, it is nothing. If the sorrowful may not find comfort; they who are in pain, patience and hope; if the poor may not get sympathy and aid, and the dying consolation, it is of doubtful good.
As for the preaching, all that we can say is, that when one produces evidence and proceeds to argue, he admits a doubt that neither evidence nor argument is of avail. God’s truths call for no evidence. If they are 239 not self-evident, no process of poor human reason can make them visible. An argument in behalf of such is a confession and a defeat. The man who undertakes to prove that the sun shines is insane and a bore.
The pulpit work of worthy divines who think aloud upon their legs has lost its attraction in losing its novelty. They imitate the late Henry Ward Beecher. And these immediate divines are filling their churches as merely platform-lecturers indulging in certain mental gymnastics that glitter and glisten like a winter’s sun on fields of ice. It is all brilliant and amusing to a few, but it is not religion.