Yes, you are a Christian in Britain, as you would be a Mahometan if you had been born in Turkey; but search the Scriptures, and examine if the design of Christianity has ever been accomplished in you. Have you been born again? No. That subject you ridicule, because you do not understand it. Have you had repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ? No; and if these subjects were pressed upon your conscience with the affection of apostolic compassion, and ardour of apostolic zeal, you would retire displeased, if not disgusted, with the minister who dares to enforce them as essential to your safety and happiness. Are you crucified to the world by the moral influence of the death of Jesus Christ? Crucified to the world! The very phrase, though scriptural, grates offensively on your ear! Crucified to the world! O no. You are devoted to its pleasures, its follies, its amusements. Shut up the theatre, abolish cards, interdict the assembly and the ball, and how would a large portion of our modern Christians be able to support life?
You may imagine that you are a good Christian, because you sometimes go to church; but an occasional visit to a material temple will not produce that moral transformation of the soul which is essential to fit you for the holy exercises and enjoyments of another world. You may reject these questions which I now propose to you; but before you reject them, permit me to urge you to search the Scriptures, and then you will see that they have a paramount claim on your attention. Can you be a Christian unless you possess the spirit, and are in some degree conformed to the image of Jesus Christ?
But it ought not to excite our astonishment, though it may our tenderest sympathy, to see the great majority of those who move in fashionable life passing away their time amidst the gaieties and follies of the world, when they are sanctioned, if not encouraged by the clergy, who ought to teach them better, both by precept and example.
We have ministers of religion who do not hesitate to hold up to ridicule and contempt the essential doctrines and self-denying precepts of their own faith; and attempt, as far as the influence of their example can extend, to banish all serious and devout piety from the social circle. They see no harm in customs which the spirit and even the letter of the Scriptures condemn; and sanction by their presence those scenes of human folly and gaiety which have captivated and ruined thousands, who were once the ornaments of their fathers' house.
Such ministers not only sanction the customs of the world, but they discountenance all serious piety, and declaim against their evangelical brethren as disturbers of the peace of the church. If Christianity be a cunningly devised fable—if the life of faith and of practical devotedness of the soul to God be mere fancies—if heaven and hell be the conceptions of romance, brought into the pulpit to terrify the credulous and please the sanguine—I should not hesitate to pronounce a heavy censure on those ministers who bring forward these subjects so often, and who enforce attention to them with so much ardent and impassioned eloquence.
But if Christianity be true—if the final happiness or misery of the human soul depend on faith in Christ—if the glories of heaven and the terrors of hell are realities which exceed the power of man to describe—then even the most sceptical must admit that the ministers of religion ought, with great boldness and impassioned earnestness, to rouse their hearers to a serious and immediate attention to these great, these awful subjects; and ought they not to teach by example, as well as by precept? and by the purity of their morals—by their religious habits and style of conversation—give strong and unequivocal proofs that they preach what they believe, and believe what they preach?
But let no Christian, whatever rank he may hold in social life, or whatever degree of reputation he may have attained for intelligence, or good sense, or for amiability of temper, presume to hope that he will ever be able to make a scriptural profession of religion (after he has felt the power of it) without exciting the displeasure, if not the opposition, of his irreligious relatives and friends. They will not object to the religion of forms and ceremonies; to the religion which is confined to the temple, or to the bed of sickness; to the religion which allows of a conformity to the gaieties and the follies of the world, and which frowns from its presence all references to death, to judgment, to heaven, and to hell; but the religion which consists in the moral renovation of the soul, which identifies man with a living Saviour, and which raises his anticipations to the glories of the invisible world, they despise, and cast it from them as a strange thing, and then ridicule it as contemptible.
THE DARK VALE ILLUMINED.
