ADDRESS OF REV. DR. DENNEN.
The topic of this closing service is not only of prime importance, but comes in its logical place. When your machinery is all educational, industrial and church-wise, the final and vital question is one of power to move it. The supreme motive power in your work is spiritual life.
Life is force, something capable of originating or resisting power or motion. Physical life is that mysterious something no analysis can detect, no alembic reveal, no power resist; which swells the bud, opens the flower, sprouts the seed, ripens the harvest.
Spiritual life, through another plane, is also a force, capable of originating or resisting power or motion. Its realm is the human soul, and draws nutriment from the soil, which that cunning chemist we call life builds up into strength and beauty.
Spiritual vitality performs a similar structural function. Once made alive in Christ Jesus, the disciple seeks for spiritual aliment.
1. Now, spiritual life, like natural life, possesses structural power. It is a master builder. One main function of the vital principle in nature is to lay hold of inert matter and convert it into living organisms. The growing tree absorbs tons of carbon from the air. The local church, if a live one, takes up into her membership more or less of the outlying population, and from aliens converts them into fellow citizens of the saints and members of the household of faith.
The ability, then, of this noble Association, second to none in the land, to advance the kingdom of Christ in the several fields where it operates, will assuredly be conditioned upon the spirit and vigor of the churches and individuals behind it, will be determined, not so much by the amount of money it receives or the number of workers it puts into the field, as by the prayers and spiritual enthusiasm of its constituency.
Carlyle once said: “The American Republic is going straight to the devil. No government can long exist that receives the refuse of all the rest of the world into its midst and makes citizens of them.” Our free institutions are to undergo a strain in the near future, I am sure, that has never yet been put upon them. Our American churches are also to be put to a similar strain. Nay, the pressure is already upon them. Are they equal to it? I believe so. We must, however, leaven the multitudes of the ignorant and unsaved with our Christianity, or they will leaven us with their illiteracy. Our ability to meet the emergency already upon us will depend, under God, upon our spiritual vitality.
2. Another function of life is its expulsive power. What it cannot use and assimilate it expels. It gathers the good and casts the bad away. Strong, vigorous life depends as much upon the one function as the other. The religious world is full of the germs and larvæ of skepticism, theistic and atheistic assaults and criticisms. A robust person can walk in the midst of pestilence unscathed, while disease springs upon one whose vitality is depressed. Precisely the same condition obtains in respect to the individual disciple, or the church, or our missionary boards.
The one effective answer to skepticism, then, of every grade and degree of virulence; the one sovereign remedy for worldliness, apathy and avarice of God’s people, is a new enduement of spiritual power. Our lips must be touched with celestial fire and our hearts bathed in Christ’s great love.
3. Another quality of life is its expansive power. The mightiest force in this world is life. It mocks at gravity; it defies cohesion; bursts every band. The same expansive property inheres in spiritual life.
You might as well shut up a growing chicken in its shell as to shut up a live Christianity in the shell of the fathers. No. Where there is life there must be expansion. She breaks through old traditions and prejudices, and steps out into new departures and broader methods, and pushes on into new regions of thought and conquest beyond. She lays her hand on the colored man of the South, saves, educates him, equips him for the life that now is, as well as for that which is to come. She stands on the shores of the great Pacific, where the shining waves lave her feet and chant their mighty anthems of freedom, and, with open, arms and a catholic heart, free of all race prejudices, welcomes the Chinaman. She uncovers the cross in the wigwam of the red man and bids the dusky sons of the forest look and live.
4. Once more spiritual life is the only complete bond of union. Says President Hopkins, “It is on this that the whole method of God in the restoration of man is based, and it is for the recognition of this by men, and their adoption of God’s method of vitality and unity, the tardy, laboring and discordant times wait. No partial reform will do; no coming man. Everywhere men are divergent, repellant. The bond of common humanity is but a string of tow to bind the Samson of human selfishness and passions. There must be a divine life, a divine centre. This center is Christ. He is the life. The nexus which is to bind this selfish world in one, and unite all races and nationalities in one common fellowship and forward movement to disciple the world, is Christ in the souls of all men. Amid every diversity of polity and people, He is the one vivifying and unifying spirit.
5. The principal question, however, is one of means. How is this life to be secured? To get fresh water we go to the spring. To get information we go to the sources of knowledge. To get spiritual vitality we go to Christ. Life in nature is the product of living organisms in contact. The strength and continuance of that life depends upon the closeness of the contact. The steel must touch the magnet to receive and retain magnetism.
So spiritual life and zeal comes from contact with a living Christ. The strength and fervor of that life is forever conditioned upon the closeness of our contact with our living Head.
No one thing so lowers spiritual heat and light as distance from Christ. Neptune has not a thousandth part of our light and warmth. He is too far away from the central orb. We are just now too far away from Christ; hence our comparative barrenness. We must sit where the fire and inspiration of His eye kindle in ours; where his glowing enthusiasm passes over into us; where the greatness and grandeur of the work He has given us to do shall thrill us and grow upon us. Then we shall mount to its accomplishment on the wings of eagles, and run and not be weary, and walk and not faint.
Never had this Association more call for enthusiasm, never for greater hopefulness. What did we see here last night—the black man and red man, men from Asia and Africa and America, strangers and proselytes, speak in their own tongues the wonderful works of God.
I cheer you on to the labor of another year. As we go down from this mount let us go to our upper chambers and, whether for eight days or as many weeks, let us tarry and pray until we are endued from on high and receive the tongues of flame and the utterance of the Spirit. Then let us, in our various fields, gird up our loins and go forth to achieve for the Lord of Hosts, resolved that before another anniversary of this Association comes round we will, God helping us, see thousands housed and happy in Christ’s dear love all over our beloved land of very race and color.