A C ku rck W ithout
T h e H o ly Ghost
BT THE LATE JOSEPH PARKER, D. D.
HE CHURCH can only do great social duties, and con tinue with constancy in great social sacrifices, in proportion as its heart is continually inspired by the Holy Ghost. The hand can
sent of the great heart of man. We have lost the Holy Spirit. What has to be done? Not to mend the outside, but to fall to praying, and to bring to bear upon heaven the violence of our impatient necessity, and the sacred ambition of men who have found by prolonged and bitter experience that all answers worth having are to be had from heaven only. What is now wanted is a MISSION TO THE CHURCH. Let the MASSES alone for a while; the Church is now mad upon the MASSES. Any proposi tion to go after the masses is hailed with delight by those persons who do nothing but approve excellent schemes and then leave them to themselves. We need a man who will preach to the PREACHER; who will convert the PUL PIT; who will set fire to the CHURCH and bring back our conscious need of the Holy Ghost. We are orthodox; but we are not Christian. Our1NOTIONS are in excel lent repair, but our love is a dead an gel in a cold heart. We are clever in the repairing and réadaptation of ma chinery; but when we come to pray, it is as if a skeleton should open its cold mouth and chatter with its lifeless teeth.■ . Ananias and Sapphira can do more mischief in the church than all the atheists that ever declared the heavens to be an untenanted space. Ananias and Sapphira endeavored to keep up a me chanical enthusiasm, and that is an im possibility in the divine life. We must have reality. Some people try to sing in God’s house, but they are not singing at all,
not go without the heart. , The heart cannot be right without compelling the hand to do its holy and ennobling bid ding. It is in vain to keep up the outward when the inward has given away. This is precisely what we are in danger of doing now. We keep up churches, institutions, organizations, machineries, after we have lost the Spirit. Is there anything more ghastly to the religious eye and the spiritual imagination than a church out of which God has gone? The Bible is read and NOT read. It is not the Bible that the man mum bled, but a book which he has found somewhere, out of which the Spirit has been driven. The very selfsame old hymns were sung that fifty years ago caused the walls to vibrate with con scious joy; and although the music was exact in technicality, and well per formed as to mere lip service, the old passion was not there, and the hymn rose to the ceiling, bruised itself against the beams of the roof, and fell back, a service unrecognized in heaven. This accounts for all the results of statistics as to attendance upon places of worship; for all the “ dilapidated husbandry” of the church; for all the boundless provision of mere space, and accommodation, and machinery, with out eliciting the sympathy and the con
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