BY A CHURCH OF ENGLAND MINISTER.
WE take the liberty of reproducing the following article by the Rev. William Adamson, Vicar of Old Ford, E., which appeared recently in The English Churchman.—
“Intrusive frogs, by three foul spirits sent,
Your ceaseless croakings have a strange portent!”—REV. xvi. 13.
The decay of Evangelical Religion, with the rapid spread of these three frog-like spirits in the ministries of the national and Free Churches of our country, is a painful phenomenon. But it is the third of these apocalyptic forces which is gaining ground before the others in the Free Churches. Not a few of the sermons to-day are little better than “Socialistic diatribes,” under the plea that “Christian Socialism” (for so they call it) is Biblical, and that the Lord Jesus Christ made Socialism of the essence of His Gospel. This comes out very clearly in the recent Conference of the Free Churches at Birmingham. With much that was excellent, scriptural, and heart-stirring, there was an overdose of the spirit of Socialism. It was belauded, and some of the leaders, in grandiloquent eulogy, urged what the Bishop of Stepney has advised as to getting into close touch with the Socialists. Indeed, it is neither exaggeration nor misrepresentation to say that many ministers who gave addresses seem to have had “Socialism” on the brain, while declaiming against “Secularism” and irreligious education in our national schools. What does this portend? We ask this question with all the more anxiety because we note how ardent the ministers of the Free Churches are to have “the Gospel re-stated, and re-stated on broader lines as to doctrine, and on political lines of modern Socialism.” We recall the trumpet of alarm sounded by the late Mr. C. H. Spurgeon, and even by so liberal a theologian as the late Dr. Dale, of Birmingham. What would those two mighty men of valour in the last century have thought and said, had they been present at the Birmingham Conference? And what would they think and say were they listeners to many Nonconformist ministers in pulpit or on platform to-day? The Puritan fine gold has indeed become dim. And the frog-like spirits have made their way into their midst with almost incredible success.
It has been said that never since Cromwell’s day have so many truly God-fearing men been returned in one election as in this. “Most of these,” we are assured by a well-known and world-wide religious paper of undenominationalism, “belong to the Labour and Socialistic parties; chiefly to the first.” But this statement requires qualification and consideration. Very few of those men can be said to be God-fearing in the Bible sense and by the Gospel standard of single-mindedness. Theirs is not a pure and
simple evangelical faith in Christ Jesus. It is mixed with the deadly creed of modern trades unionism—a natural religion than which none could be more cruel, selfish, and tyrannical. In this respect it is Satanic and anti-Christian. Its god and saviour is “SELF.” The honour of God and the happiness of all are secondary considerations. It is but the unit of self in the individual organised into an instrument for crushing the middle and upper classes, in order to attain its selfish supremacy. The very words “Labour,” “Working class,” and “Trades,” indicate this. Engage in conversation with the rank and file, note the blend of refinement and social revolution in the columns of the Clarion, which, we are gravely told, has more influence to-day than has the Times! Watch the movement with a lynx eye. Study the prophecies of “the last time” in the Bible. And what will you find? The idolatry of “SELF,” the god of this world.
The owl, when told by the nightingale that the moon was shining, shut its eyes and said, “It shines not, for I cannot see it.” The ostrich put its head in the sand and said, “There is no huntsman in pursuit, so I am safe.” The antagonistic parties in Jerusalem, when our Lord forecast its overthrow within half a century, laughed Him to scorn, and made Him out unpatriotic. Britons, like the sea birds in the fable, ridiculing the warning of the stormy petrel that a storm was brewing, think that God cares too much for England to allow her to be left to humiliation and disaster at the hands of anarchy or of foreign attack. They discern not God’s beacon of warning in the person of each Jewish member of the tribe of the wandering foot under the ban of God. They disregard the hair’s-breadth escape of England in the Boer War of South Africa, when a coalition of foreign empires awaited the Boer triumph to effect her ruin—a divine intimation of what will happen if He determines on judgment. And they heed not the handwriting on the wall in the shape of the FIRST stage of the Social Revolution, 1905-06. Is this wise? The Prince of Wales, when recently visiting our colonies under the Southern Cross, sent home a message, “Wake up, England!” We have cried similarly, and in a more momentous crisis, “Awake, thou that sleepest! Awake to righteousness, and sin not!” Otherwise the present earthquake will prove the prelude to worse convulsion. What saith the prophet in Isaiah xxviii. 21, “That he may do his work, his strange work, and bring to pass his act, his strange act.” And judgment is His strange and dreadful work.
When will England’s children, especially the upper and middle classes, and the Churches, consider—(1) What the Word of God tells them in Ezekiel, Daniel, and John’s Apocalypse; (2) What the history of ancient nations spells as to the hand of God in their discipline or overthrow; and (3) What the signs of the times plainly furnish in confirmation of those? The call is, as it was to Judah and Jerusalem, in the days of Isaiah, and eight centuries
later in the time of our Lord, “Repent.” England must change her mind, and convert her heart to the Lord in repentance and in righteousness. Who knows whether He may not avert the SECOND and THIRD stages of the earthquake, as when Nineveh—that great city—repented at the preaching of Jonah? The true Evangelical Church of God, and the living members thereof, must not ally themselves with the three frog-like spirits, all of which are ready to unite temporarily against the Lord and against His anointed. The servants of God must not get into touch—as the Bishop of Stepney advises and some Free Churchmen propose—with those anti-Christian forces with a view to fellowship or alliance. They must come out from among them and be separate. They must stand fast in “the evangelical faith,” quit them like men, and be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. And as for dealings with them, the only God-commanded and God-commanded way of keeping touch with the dupes of any one or all of those three frog-like spirits is—(1) To preach to them the everlasting Gospel more faithfully and fervently, more truly and tenderly, than ever; (2) To point out to them, and to all classes in the land, the divine forecasts in the Bible-chart of prophecy; (3) To pray without ceasing unto God for them, and for our land itself, for a revival and outpouring of His holy Spirit for our national restoration; and (4) To place before them the light of the Christian life and walk of faith, with that blessed hope that He will “restore all things,” and usher in the millennium—that “golden age” of the new heavens and a new earth 10.
Within the last month an eminent American divine has said that “the best days are to come; we have the golden age dawning upon us; the brightening red of to-day’s evening sky tells us that to-morrow it will be fair.” And the late Archbishop Temple, with rationalistic optimism, said that England was now to swing through the ringing grooves of time and tide in her favour for ten thousand years to come. And even our Christian poet, Cowper, in his exquisite “Winter Walk at Noon,” wrote of this present time, and of what remains of the tempestuous state of things, that it was “merely as the rocking of the sea before a calm, that rocks itself to rest.” And we are assured by the “agitator lights” of the Social Revolution—and in most jubilant terms—that their movement “will bring the millennium for humanity.” But such is not the Bible view. “For, behold, the Lord will come with fire and with his chariots like the whirlwind, to render his anger with fury and his rebuke with flames of fire; for by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh, and the slain of the Lord shall be many.” This is parallel with Rev. xix. 11-21.
GOD will multiply to pardon; but modify and take down his law! never.—Dr. Duncan.
THERE is no doubting in faith; there may be much doubting in the believer.—Dr. Duncan.