PART I

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CHAPTER - THE DISEASE OF THE CHURCH When Jesus rose from the dead the whole Church of Christ could assemble in one upper chamber. At the time of his ascension it numbered one hundred and twenty. Of all the ages of history it was the age of universal corruption. Outside of Judea, idolatry reigned supreme. Gods and goddesses, representing every phase of vice, were openly worshiped in magnificent temples and at costly shrines. All power was in the hands of a magnificent and heartless imperialism. The masses were sunk in hopeless degradation, without means, without learning, without protection, and sixty millions of them in the Roman Empire alone were slaves. Aged parents were suffered to die of starvation, children were exposed and murdered. Men fought each other as gladiators in the amphitheaters and died by thousands for the amusement of the cruel populace. Every precept of the moral law was violated almost without conscience and without hindrance. The early disciples had no wealth, no social position, no prestige, no Government aid, no help from established institutions. They were in themselves a despised and feeble folk, without influence, without skill, without education, without a New Testament, or even the Old Testament in the hands of the people, without a Christian literature, or a single Christian house of worship. Pomp, power, custom and public sentiment were all against them. They were reproached, reviled, persecuted, and subjected to exile and death.

But those early Christians had the help of an indwelling, sanctifying Saviour and the anointing of the Holy Ghost, and with that equipment they faced a hostile world and all the malignant powers of darkness, and conquered. Within seventy years, according to the smallest estimate, there were half a million followers of Jesus, and some authorities affirm that there were a quarter of a million in the province of Babylon alone. In other words, with Holy Spirit power upon them, they increased more than four thousand fold in threescore years.

Is it too much to say or believe that if the Protestant churches and ministry had a similar anointing of Holy Ghost power today, we could take the world for Christ in ten years? We now have thrones and governments and protection and favorable public sentiment, and hundreds of billions of money in the hands of Christians. We have established institutions and organizations and all needed facilities, the Bible printed in some four hundred languages, and a Christian literature in abundance, like the leaves of the forest. We have everything desirable for doing Christian work but the general enduement of Holy Spirit power. But without that, alas, how feeble, comparatively, when measured by that first century, are our Christian triumphs!

If any thoughtful reader should be tempted to accuse me of exaggeration, let him note the testimony of the great souls on the watchtowers of Zion.

Fifty years ago that spiritual commentator and theological professor of Oberlin, Prof. Henry Cowles, commenting on the depressed standard of holiness and the consequent confusion and shame of the Church, wrote: “Plainly, there is no remedy but for the Church to come back to the very elements of piety. She must return to God and holy communion. The standard of piety must be raised. What can the Church do for the conversion of the world, for her own existence even, without personal holiness — much deep, pure, personal holiness. No wonder that a conviction of this truth should have fastened upon discerning minds with painful strength. The standard of piety throughout the American Church is extremely and deplorably low. It is low compared with that of the primitive Church, compared with the provisions of the gospel, with the obligations of redeemed sinners, or with the requisite qualifications for the work to be done. The spirit of the world has deeply pervaded and exceedingly engrossed the heart of the Church. Go through the land and estimate her unconsecrated wealth, measure the energy of worldliness and the apathy of love and prayer, for the proof. There is extensively a public sentiment which repels the subject of personal holiness, hears it named with fear, discusses it with sensitive apprehensions of excess, or even treats it with sarcasm, and, of course, which shields the heart and conscience against the appeal of truth … The responsibilities and privileges of Christians in this life must be clearly exhibited, and mightily urged upon the heart and conscience of the Church.”

About twenty-five years ago, Dr. Albert Barnes, the commentator, of blessed memory, delivered a discourse in New York City, in which he made the following statement concerning the condition of the churches: “Not one in ten of the membership of our church [Presbyterian] are doing anything effective for the sanctification of believers, or the salvation of sinners.” “That utterance was very extensively reported, and never,” writes one of wide reading, “was its strict correctness questioned.”

Still later Dr. Cuyler wrote: “Too many new converts sit down contented with the fact that they are converted. Born into the kingdom, they are satisfied to remain babies or dwarfs. To make a profession seems to be about the beginning and the end of their religion. They have no spiritual ambition to get beyond their alphabet, and the Church of Christ gains very little more than their useless, uncreditable names on their muster-rolls.”

Rev. A. T. Pearson, D. D., said before a Christian Conference in Detroit: “God meant to impress men by the contrast of the unworldliness of his people; but, on the whole, the witness of a separate and sanctified life is gone, and the witness of the tongue of fire is gone with it. The worldliness of the Church is a fact to which we can not with impunity shut our eyes.”

Dr. Rice, of Virginia, said: “The work of foreign missions will not advance to any great degree till there is a higher type of piety at home; that it would not consist with the plan of God to diffuse over the world such a low type of piety as prevails among us. In fact, such a sort of piety has but little disposition to diffuse itself: it requires all its vitality and energy to maintain its present position — there is none to spare.”

Dwight L. Moody, than whom, probably, no man living is better acquainted with the spiritual condition of the English-speaking world, writes: “Nine-tenths, at least, of the church members never think of speaking for Christ. If they see a man, perhaps a near relative, just going right down to ruin, going rapidly, they never think of speaking to him about his sinful course, and of seeking to win him to Christ. Now certainly there must be something wrong. And yet, when you talk with them, you find they have faith, and you can not say they are not children of God, but they have not the power; they have not the liberty; they have not the love that real disciples of Christ should have. A great many people are thinking that we need new measures, that we need new churches, that we need new organs, new choirs, and all these new things. That is not what the Church of God needs today. It is the old power that the Apostles had; that is what we want, and if we have that in our churches, there will be new life. Then we will have new ministers — the same old ministers renewed with power, filled with the Spirit.” … “Oh, that God may anoint his people! Not the ministry only but every disciple. Do not suppose pastors are the only laborers needing it. There is not a mother but needs it in her house to regulate her family, just as much as the minister needs it in the pulpit, or the Sunday-school teacher in his Sunday-school. We all need it together, and let us not rest day nor night until we possess it. If that is the uppermost thought in our hearts, God will give it to us, if we just hunger and thirst for it, and say, ‘God helping me, I will not rest until endued with power from on high.’” Spurgeon said: “If we have not the Spirit of God, it were better to shut the churches, to nail up the doors, to put a black cross on them, and say, ‘God have mercy on us!’ If you ministers have not the Spirit of God you would better not preach, and you people would better stay at home. I think I speak not too strongly when I say that a church in the land without the Spirit of God is rather a curse than a blessing. If you have not the Spirit of God, Christian worker, remember that you stand in somebody else’s way.

You are as a tree bearing no fruit standing where another fruitful tree might grow. This is solemn work: the Holy Spirit or nothing and worse than nothing. Death and condemnation to a church that is not yearning after the Spirit, and crying and groaning until the Spirit has wrought mightily in her midst.”

Rev. J. Morlais Jones. D. D., in his inaugural address over the Congregational Union of England and Wales, in 1896, said: “Wanting in what? We can not pretend that the Church is telling on the world as it ought to. We are filled with a divine discontent. There is something missing. The first want is a renewal of the purely religious life of the Church. The Church is splendidly organized. We are great in all the accomplishments of religion. But the tone of religious life is low. God and fellowship with God are ceasing to be pathetic needs; the prayer-meeting, which used to be the thermometer by which we measure the temperature of the Church, is fast becoming a tradition, and the ideal Sunday service is getting to be that in which the music and the esthetics of worship are perfect and the sermon is not too long. The first corrective is earnest, devoted and constant prayer.” We would only add, let that prayer be after the advice of Jesus — prayer for the Holy Spirit.

Rev. S. A. Keen, D. D., the mighty advocate of holiness and Spirit power of the Methodist Episcopal Church, so recently translated, wrote, in his “Pentecostal Papers”: “How presumptuous for us to attempt our mission without the anointing, when Jesus did not venture to enter upon his without the aid of the Spirit. How careful he was to guard his first disciples against venturing to their mission — even after their commission was given, and the gospel message all ready for the mouth of its heralds — without the anointing of the Holy Ghost! He said: ‘Tarry till ye be endued with the power from on high.’ Yet how many ministers, teachers, missionaries, evangelists, and workers have gone to their mission without this power to achieve it! The great blunder of the Church today is, that so many are attempting to do God’s work, and to save souls, without the power of the Holy Ghost. Then we wonder why, for so much giving and doing and going, there is so little fruit and so little salvation. If the column of the Church would halt a few moments, get on its knees, look up, and receive the Holy Ghost, without stopping long enough to go into camp, it would push on the campaign so successfully that it would be the surprise of this century.”

Rev. Asa Mahan, D. D., LL. D., first President of Oberlin College, once wrote: “What are the relations to Christ of the mass of believers in the ministry and in the churches? What were my own relations, also, during the first eighteen years of my Christian life? The sense of orphanage rather than sonship, of deadness to the things of God rather than to the things of the world, and of bondage rather than of liberty, have a leading place in their religions consciousness. Such was my experience. I read: ‘He that believeth in me, out of him shall flow rivers of living water.’ All this fullness, I said, ought to be, but is not true in my experience. For this state I found, as multitudes are finding, but one remedy. We must wait in prayer ‘the promise of the Father,’ until we are ‘filled with the Holy Ghost.’” President Finney, the mighty Elijah of our century, before he left us for glory, wrote these words: “It is amazing to witness the extent to which the Church has practically lost sight of the necessity of this enduement of power. Christians and ministers go to work without it. I mourn to be obliged to say that the ranks of the ministry seem to be filling up with those who do not possess it. May the Lord have mercy upon us! Will this last remark be thought uncharitable? If so, let the report of the Home Missionary Society, for example, be heard upon this subject. Surely something is wrong. An average of five souls won to Christ by each missionary of that Society in a year’s toil certainly indicates a most alarming weakness in the ministry. Have all, or even a majority, of these ministers been endued with the power which Christ promised? If not, why not? But, if they have, is this all that Christ intended by the promise? I have alluded to ministers not that I suppose them exceptionally weak in faith and power as laborers for God. On the contrary, I regard them as among our most devoted and self-denying laborers in the cause of God. This fact simply illustrates the alarming weakness that pervades every branch of the Church, both clergy and laity. Are we not weak? Are we not criminally weak? It has been suggested that by writing thus I should offend the ministry and the Church. I can not believe that the statement of so palpable a fact will be regarded as an offence. The fact is, there is something sadly defective in the education of the ministry and of the Church. The ministry is weak because the Church is weak. And then, again, the Church is kept weak by the weakness of the ministry. Oh, for a conviction of the necessity of this enduement of power and faith in the promise of Christ!”

Bishop Peck said: “The Church is loaded with a body of death, filled with backslidings, and is comparatively powerless for the great work to which she is ordained of heaven.”

Bishop Foster: “How true that the Methodist Discipline is a dead letter. Its rules — no one ever thinks of disciplining its members for violating them.

They forbid the taking of such diversions as do not minister to godliness; yet the Church itself goes into shows and frolics and festivals and fairs, which destroy the spiritual life of the young as well as of the old. The extent to which this is now carried on is appalling. The spiritual death it carries in its train will only be known when the millions it has swept into hell stand before the judgment. Is not worldliness seen in the music?

Choirs, often sneering skeptics, go through a cold, artistic, or operatic performance, which is as much in harmony with spiritual worship as an opera or theater. The number is comparatively small who honestly desire and earnestly endeavor after full consecration, all the mind that was in Christ, (“Christ Crowned Within,” pages 25, 26).

Cowles, Mahan, Finney, Albert Barnes, Cuyler, Rice, Moody, Pearson, Jones, Spurgeon, Keen, and Bishops Peck and Foster, noble representatives of four great evangelical denominations in England and America — these are not men of reckless thinking or rash statement. They all agree that there is a great need, pressing, urgent, awful! — the need of such a personal baptism of the Holy Ghost as shall bring holiness and power to the churches and the ministry.

Joseph Cook, who has acquired an inveterate habit of saying things, says: “The great need of the world is the Christianizing of Christianity.” We do, indeed, sorely need to get back to the Pentecostal experience with its subsequent holiness and power. If anybody doubts it, and yet questions the accuracy of the opinion of these leaders above quoted, let him study the unquestionable facts of the present hour. Last week’s Advance (July 23, 1896) lies before me, informing us that a whole religious denomination in England, with an honorable history, is “discussing the cause of its census decrease.” One correspondent of the Methodist Recorder thinks it is “probably bicycles.” A whole denomination, bearing the honored name of Wesley, and not holding its own in England, where millions are living in sin and dying without hope and without God, is a matter too serious for satire or joke.

But we can find ample food for serious reflection nearer home. We will take the Congregational denomination, of which the writer has been a member since childhood. The last four Year Books show that on the average for the last four years there have been over thirteen hundred Congregational churches annually that did not receive an addition by profession of faith. The Year Book for 1896 shows fourteen hundred and eighty-three such churches. The average church of the denomination has one hundred and nine members and six and one-half converts per year, only one convert annually for seventeen church members.

But in some quarters the picture is darker still. We will take Massachusetts.

There are probably no other equal number of churches on the globe that have a more cultured ministry, or better equipment for Christian work, or a more intelligent constituency or more promising opportunities for winning souls. They all rejoice in their intellectual privileges, living in sight of the “Athens of America.” They have all needed organizations, and as perfect facilities for doing Christian work as the world is likely to see. While the Congregational churches of Michigan numbered thirty-five more than there were ministers, there was a superabundance of one hundred and ninety-seven Congregational ministers in Massachusetts. Yet, with all these undeniable advantages, there has been for years an annual average of one hundred and forty Congregational churches in Massachusetts that did not report a conversion in a year. In Michigan it took fourteen church member to make one convert in a year — a fact truly sad enough, but in Massachusetts it took thirty! If that early Church in Jerusalem had had a like success, they would have had four converts the first year! They had no Boston culture among their preachers or membership, but they had something infinitely better — the baptism with the Holy Ghost for holiness and power, and the result was three thousand converts the first day of public effort, and converts daily afterward. But seventeen Congregational churches in Massachusetts can be named with an average of four hundred and eighty-three members each, which report all together only fifty-five conversions, one for every one hundred and forty-nine members. Such work in churches would not be very liable to hasten the Millennium.

Mr. Moody writes in the New York Independent (quoted in the Advance, December 10, 1896) as follows: “In a recent issue of your paper I saw an article from a contributor which stated that there were over three thousand churches in the Congregational and Presbyterian bodies of this country that did not report a single member added by profession of faith last year. Can this be true? The thought has taken such hold of me that I can’t get it out of my mind. It is enough almost to send a thrill of horror through the soul of every true Christian. If this is the case with these two large denominations, what must be the condition of the others also? Are we all going to sit still and let this thing continue? Shall our religious newspapers and our pulpits keep their mouths closed like ‘dumb dogs that can not bark’ to warn people of approaching danger? Should we not all lift up our voice like a trumpet about this matter? What must the Son of God think of such a result of our labor as this? What must an unbelieving world think about a Christianity that can’t bring forth any more fruit? And have we no care for the multitude of souls going down to perdition every year while we all sit and look on? And this country of ours, where will it be in the next ten years if we don’t awake out of sleep?”

Think of more than three thousand ministers in two denominations, world-renowned for their schools and culture, preaching a whole year, and aided by deacons and Sabbath-school teachers and Christian parents and church members and prayer-meetings and Sabbath-schools and Endeavor societies and help and helpers innumerable, and all without a convert!

Think of the charge of Rev. Thomas Dixon, made in the Academy of Music, New York, last September, that the eighty-six Methodist churches of that city, with over seventeen thousand church members, ran a year at an expense of five hundred and fifty thousand dollars and had a net gain of two hundred and forty-one members, and about the same number of Baptist churches, with eighteen thousand members, and an annual outlay of five hundred thousand dollars, had a net gain of two hundred and sixteen members a year, while all around them were half a million human beings who, as regards Christian knowledge, are heathen, and heathen not in name and form, but in heart and spirit, and that the same state of affairs prevails in the Presbyterian Church, notwithstanding its immense wealth and power.

Think of the wickedness of our ever-growing cities, waxing under the very shadows of our church towers, church attendance declining in the country until we are told that fifty per cent of the population of the State of Maine, and fifty-nine and a half per cent of the population of Vermont, have not been to church on the average for the last six years, and Dr. Fairbanks, of St. Johnsbury, Vt., declares that not more than seventy-five thousand (twenty-two per cent.) are ever in church on a given Sabbath. And all this while the Christian Church — the Bride of Christ — as Bro. Moody says, “is walking hand in glove with the world,” or what is worse, is indolently sleeping in its guilty embrace.

Truly, something is needed besides church organization and machinery and culture and pulpit oratory. These unspeakably sad facts above cited ought to call the Church to its knees in humble supplication for the mercy of God and the outpouring baptism with the Holy Ghost. The only escape from our spiritual impotency, the only way out of the difficulties and threatening perils of Zion for believers in general, and for these ministers and theological professors and the leaders of Israel in particular, is a journey back to Pentecost.

A married missionary and his wife can be supported in Japan for a year for one thousand dollars. A Congregational church in New England can be named in which during four years each convert, counting the interest on the permanent investment and the current expenses of the church, cost five thousand dollars apiece, enough to support ten missionaries for a year in Japan. One year the converts were so few that each one cost enough to support sixteen male missionaries for a year in Japan. For a term of years that church has had but one convert for every fifty church members, and one for every fifty in the Sabbath-school. One year it was one for every one hundred. In other words, that church is training gospel-hardened candidates for damnation. Many other churches might be named that are scarcely less inefficient. Yet we have become so accustomed to these things that such deplorable facts do not awaken a comment in any quarter.

A baptism with the Holy Ghost upon that same minister and church would make them felt throughout the world. A journey back to Pentecost is the only cure of such disgraceful barrenness.

CHAPTER - QUESTIONS AND DEFINITIONS Is there any balm in Gilead for the hurt of the Bride of Christ? Is there in the redemptive work of the heavenly Bridegroom any provision for a full salvation from her sin? Has this heavenly Being — the Holy Son of God — coming from glory to prepare a Bride for his eternal possession, made it possible for her to be “as he is,” in this present evil world? Holiness is his character. Holiness he loves. Has he made provision for her holiness, that she may perfectly delight his heart? He said in that solemn hour in the upper chamber in intercessory prayer: “For their sakes I sanctify myself that they also may be sanctified.” Is sanctification the blessed, blood-bought privilege of believers? What is sin? What is holiness? What is sanctification in a redeemed child of God? What is the salvation needed by a lost or fallen race? What is the baptism of the Holy Ghost, and what does it accomplish for believers? These are vital questions that touch the very marrow of the subject before us.

Webster defines sin as (1) “Transgression of the law of God; disobedience of the divine command; any violation of God’s will, either in purpose or conduct; moral deficiency in character. (2) Sin is spoken of in theology as original or actual. Actual sin is the act of a moral agent in violating a known rule of duty. Original sin, as generally understood. is native depravity of heart, that want of conformity of heart to the divine will, that corruption of nature or deterioration of the moral character of man which is supposed to be the effect of Adam’s apostasy, and which manifests itself in moral agents by positive acts of disobedience to the divine will.”

The Century Dictionary appends this note to its definition of sin: “The true definition of sin is a much contested question, theologians being broadly divided into two schools of thought: the one holding that all sin consists in voluntary and conscious acts of the individual; the other, that it includes the moral character of the race. Original sin is the innate depravity and corruption of the nature common to all mankind. But whether this native depravity is properly called sin, or whether it is only a tendency, and becomes sin only when yielded to by a conscious and voluntary act of the individual, is a question upon which theologians differ.”

Writers upon sin and depravity and holiness may in a kind of general way, and with sufficient accuracy for this discussion, be divided into three classes: 1. Those who affirm that all sin lies in the wrong action of the will, and that there is no moral depravity of nature from which we need salvation. 2. Those who hold that sin is both voluntary transgression and a sinful constitution, which is the source of transgression, for both of which we are responsible, but from which we can not be saved completely in this life. 3. Those who hold that we have both actual sins of the will and a corrupt nature, from both of which we may be saved in this life.

The author believes that the truth is with the third class, that Scripture and reason and the experience of God’s sanctified ones justify their position. It is not his purpose to make this book a polemic, but simply to state the general position of conflicting schools sufficiently to make plain what he believes is the truth and the Word of God.

President Finney, writing in the Oberlin Review for May and August of 1846, on “Moral Depravity,” is a representative of the first class. Arguing against the position of President Edwards, and Dr. Woods, of Andover, and the Presbyterian Confession and older Calvinists generally, he affirms: “moral depravity can not be predicated of any involuntary acts or states of mind, for moral law legislates only over free, intelligent choice.” “moral depravity is sin. Sin is a violation of law, and must consist in choice.” “Moral depravity can not consist in any attribute of nature or constitution, nor in any lapsed and fallen state of nature, for this is physical, and not moral depravity.” “It can not consist in anything that is a part of mind or body, nor in any involuntary action or state of either mind or body.” “It can not consist in anything back of choice; whatever is back of choice is without the pale of legislation.” “Moral depravity, then, strictly speaking, can only be predicated of selfish, ultimate intention.” “Moral depravity is the depravity of free will, not of the faculty itself, but of its free action. “It consists in a violation of moral law.”

It will be seen from these quotations that President Finney denied any moral corruption of human nature, any inbred sin inherited from our fallen race. He carried forward the application of the term moral depravity from the nature of man to the outward, voluntary conduct of man. “It can not consist,” lie said, “in a sinful constitution, or in a constitutional appetency or craving for sin. Moral depravity is sin itself, and not the cause of sin. It is not something back of sin, that sustains to it the relation of a cause, but is the essence and the whole of sin.”

How, then, it may be asked by the reader, did Finney account for the universal depravity or sinfulness of man? It was on this wise: “man is not morally, but physically, depraved. Physical depravity may be predicated of all the powers and involuntary states of body and of mind, of the intelligence, of the sensibility, and of the faculty of will. That is, the actings and states of the intelligence may become disordered, depraved, deranged, or fallen from the state of integrity and healthiness. The sensibility or feeling department of the mind may be sadly and physically depraved. The appetites and passions, the desires and cravings, the antipathies and repellences of the feelings fall into great disorder and anarchy. Artificial appetites are generated, and the whole sensibility becomes a wilderness, a chaos of conflicting and clamorous desires, emotions and passions.” “The sensibility acts as a powerful impulse to the will from the moment of birth, and secures the consent and activity of the will before the reason is at all developed. The will is thus committed to the gratification of feeling and appetite when first the idea of moral obligation is developed.” “It was the priority of the action of the sensibilities over that of reason, leading to the committal of the will to self-gratification, coupled with the influence of universally depraved example, that leads to universal sin.” He argued that the theory of a corrupt nature received by inheritance reflects upon the goodness of God, making Him by creation the author of our sin; but he did not show how his own theory of the providential priority of the action of the sensibilities over that of reason upon the will reflected any less upon the goodness of God. By one theory of depravity, it is God’s creation of beings with a corrupt nature that ultimates in universal sin; by the other, it is his providential arrangement of the development of the mind and moral powers that ends in universal sin. By either supposition, God’s hand is equally apparent and the result is precisely the same.

Many arguments which I shall only stop to name seem to prove conclusively that back of all actions of the will there is a corrupt nature in all of us at birth inherited to our sorrow by race connection. 1. The universality of sin is a strong presumptive proof. The fact that every duck as soon as it is hatched takes to water, proves that by nature it is an aquatic fowl. The fact that every child, of every family, of whatever age or tribe or clime, whatever be its surroundings, begins to sin with the very dawn of its moral faculties, is awful evidence that the very faculties themselves are corrupt. 2. The Scriptures expressly teach the doctrine of the corruption of our nature. “The heart is deceitful above all things” ( Jeremiah 17:9). “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” ( Genesis 8:21). By “heart” in Scriptural language is meant the man himself, the soul, that which thinks and feels and chooses. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” ( John 3:6). That is, a child born of fallen parents will have a corrupt nature. Ephesians 2:3 reads: “We also … were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.”

Jews as well as Gentiles, all alike were “by nature,” displeasing to God.

The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God.” In Ephesians 4:17,18, Paul speaks of the Gentiles as “alienated from the life of God, because of the hardening of their hearts, because of the ignorance that is in them.” In I. Corinthians 2:14, all are represented as by nature “dead in trespasses and sins.” Many other passages might be cited that seem to teach or imply the corruption of the very nature of man. Romans 8:7,8: “The carnal mind is enmity against God: … they that are in the flesh can not please God.” 3. The universal necessity of regeneration is an argument for this truth.

Regeneration is the change of heart, of nature, by the Holy Spirit. Jesus makes no exception in the cases of babes, or children. The passage evidently means every descendant of Adam, with no exception of class or family or age. God always included people and their “little ones” in the provisions of His grace, contemplating them from birth as needing to be saved, and as interested in the plan of salvation. No doubt the child dying in early life will, in some way unknown to us, become a recipient of that regenerating grace. The covenant of which circumcision was the seal, and the repetition of it in infant baptism to those who practice it, is a sign that children are in a state of pollution, and need cleansing grace. 4. Another argument is drawn from the universality of death which was the penalty of sin. Many hold that this meant physical death as well as spiritual, and, therefore, the physical death of infants is a Scriptural proof that they were born with a corrupted nature that will with absolute certainty end in spiritual death unless they become the subjects of redemptive grace, which is not doubted. 5. The corruption of nature is argued from the universal conviction of the people of God. True Christians, men and women of unquestioned purity and piety, are convinced that there is within them an inherent depravity of heart and nature, warring against all their holy purposes, opposing their conscience and resisting their purest impulses and strivings. They groan under this depravity as a grievous burden. This sense of bondage and inward corruption voices itself in all Christian literature and sings its sorrow in plaintive hymns. One of the purest of souls and most honored composers of sacred song writes: “My God, I cry with every breath For some kind power to save, To break the yoke of sin and death And thus redeem the slave.” And again: “Their hearts, by nature all unclean And all their actions, guilt.” And still again: “Lord! let not all my hopes be vain, Create my heart entirely new.” It is this sense of inward corruption that gives the unrest of soul to earnest Christians and causes them to cry in anguish: “Oh, wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”

Who that has resolved on living comformably to the holy law of God, and struggled with foes within, can not interpret such words from his own heart’s experience? Who does not feel that his disordered affections, so difficult to control and fasten and concentrate supremely upon God, and his unholy passions, so difficult to restrain and correct, so easily kindled into forbidden anger, so readily confirmed into hateful revenge, or subjected to low and debasing indulgences, spring from a fallen and corrupt nature?

So long as the life of man is a warfare, — a warfare, not merely with the world and Satan, but with those erratic sensibilities, those wild passions and propensities of his own soul, those springs of evil in his own being, — he will carry with him an ever-present evidence of the corruption of human nature, all evidence that will last till sanctifying grace has made him a full “partaker of the divine nature.”

There is no argument against human consciousness. Dr. Samuel Johnson said: “I know I am free, and that is the end of it.” Dr. Daniel Steele, of Boston University, says: “consciousness killed Calvinism.” And it did it in spite of Calvinism’s cast-iron logic. This universal consciousness of inward defilement and pollution, of malignant feelings and abnormal appetites and diseased imaginations in spite of the choices and volitions, can not be argued against. There is something besides the acts of will of which conscience and the law of God take notice. The nature of man is corrupt. 6. It has been wisely argued by others that the whole gospel economy proceeds on the ground of man’s natural depravity, or corruption of nature.

Says Luther Lee, in his “Elements of Theology”: “There are two leading truths on the very face of the gospel, on the ground of which the whole gospel system proceeds. These truths are the following:

First. All are lost, and stand in need of salvation. Secondly. Christ is the Saviour of all, able and willing to save all who will come unto him that they might have life. These which are fundamental, and draw after them every other part of the gospel system, clearly suppose a fallen and corrupt state of human nature; for they can be truths only in view of the truth of our inherent depravity. If man is not corrupt in nature, and if all sin consists in voluntary actions, it is perfectly possible to avoid all sin so as to need no atonement for sin, no restorer, no mediator, no interposition of Jesus Christ, to reconcile us to God. It would be profane to say that men are unreconciled to God so as to need a mediator and lost so as to need salvation while in the same state in which God created them. Hence, if men are not by nature corrupt, it is possible t o live free from all sin, so as not to need the atoning blood to wash away our sins, or the Holy Ghost to renew our hearts. This would be subversive of the whole gospel system.”

As the holy Fletcher wrote: “if man is not polluted, why must he be washed in the blood of the immaculate Lamb? If his soul is not disordered, what occasion for such a divine Physician? In a word, if he is not born in sin, why is a new birth so absolutely necessary that Christ declares that without it no man can see the kingdom of God?” (p. 123).

Dr. Charles Hodge is a fair representative of the second class. He was a champion of the baldest Calvinism, teaching the imputation of Adam’s sin to his descendants; the corruption of their entire nature; that it is truly and properly of the nature of sin, involving both guilt and pollution; that it retains its character as sin even in the regenerated; that it renders the soul spiritually dead, entirely unable of himself to do anything good in the sight of God. (Vol. II., Sys. Theol., p. 230) He further taught that sanctification is never perfected in this life; that sin is not in any case entirely subdued; so that the most advanced believer has need to pray for the forgiveness of sins” (Vol. III., pp. 245 and 258).

This is truly severe and dark enough, that we must all bear the guilt of Adam’s sin, and a consequent guilty corruption, which still inheres in the Christian’s heart, and from which not all the atoning work of Christ, nor all the infinite grace of God, nor all the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit, can cleanse us in this life. This is truly appalling, and, if believed, it might well fill the whole Christian Church with the anguish of despair.

Rev. Asbury Lowrey, D. D., author of “Positive Theology” and “Possibilities of Grace,” fairly states the Wesleyan view, and represents the third class. He writes: “Redemption, in all its stages, is a stern grapple with sin. Sin is an alien element, alike antagonistic to God and the interests of men. Sin exists under Scriptural aspects. First, as a taint of evil in man. Second, as evil done by man. There is a specific difference between a sinful state and a sinful practice. In practice, sin is the transgression of the law. A sinful state implies a corrupt nature, a bent to evil, a heart alienated from God and opposed to holiness.” “But according to Scriptures, there is a point of culmination in grace that belongs to this life — a state in which, according to Paul, we ‘stand perfect and complete in all the will of God’ ( Colossians 4:12).” “This finished work of salvation from sin we call entire sanctification, or perfect holiness. It is known by various titles and phrases in the Bible, such as ‘perfection,’ ‘sanctification,’ ‘perfect love,’ ‘pure in heart,’ dead to sin,’ ‘crucified with Christ,’ ‘Christ liveth in me,’ ‘mind of Christ,’ ‘partakers of th e divine nature,’ ‘free from sin,’ ‘filled with the Spirit,’ ‘loving God with all the soul, mind and strength,’ ‘cleansed from all sin and from all unrighteousness,’ ‘cleansed from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit,’ ‘perfecting holiness in the fear of God,’ ‘that the body of sin might be destroyed,’ ‘that he might destroy the works of the devil,’ ‘purify the sons of Levi and purge them as gold and silver,’ ‘from all your filthiness and from all your idols will I cleanse you.’” “All these phrases have substantially the same signification.” “They represent the cleansing of the believer’s soul, and the reproduction in him of the image of Christ” (Possibilities of Grace, pp. 142 and 210).

CHAPTER - DOCTRINAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL HINDRANCES It is one of the marvels of a thinking mind, and one of the strongest proofs of the divinity of Christianity, that it has escaped annihilation from the falsities of its own friends and defenders, — false lives or false doctrines or false philosophies. There is not a doctrine of the creed that has not been perverted or travestied or denied by learned theologians. There is not a truth of Scripture that has not been rejected, condemned or controverted.

And scarcely an error can be named that some learned doctor has not advocated and supported by his texts. This is in general; the great theme before us for consideration has not escaped the common fate. Great and good men, whom all love to honor, and whose names are spoken with reverence, have so written upon the great themes of sin and holiness or sanctification, that they have obscured the subjects by their philosophies, and “darkened counsel by words.”

Here is the theory of Dr. Hodge, to which reference has already been made. Laying upon us the guilt of Adam’s sin, and holding us responsible for the entailed corruption in every sense, his picture of sin is painted in too dark colors, and needlessly offends every sentiment of justice and equity, and every conception of divine goodness in the heart of man. His standard of holiness is as much too high. He tells us that no allowances can be made for the natural infirmities, the unavoidable limitations of human faculties consequent upon the fall, the error of judgment, the lapses of memory, the mistaken conceptions of duty and propriety. The law of God requires of us such absolute holiness as might have been required of Adam’s posterity if he had not sinned, and was required of Adam. “The thing to be done is to turn from sin to holiness; to love God perfectly and our neighbor as ourselves; to perform every duty without defect or omission, and keep ourselves from all sin of thought, word, or deed, of heart or life. Can any man do this? Does any man need argument to convince him that he can not do it? He knows two things as clearly and surely as he knows his own existence: first, that he is bound to be morally perfect, to keep all God’s commands, to have all right feelings in constant exercise, as the occasion calls for them, and to avoid all sin in feeling as well as in act; and, secondly, that he can no more do this than he can raise the dead” (Vol. II., p. 271). “Man is utterly disabled and enfeebled by moral inability, through inherited corruption; he is still under obligation to be absolutely holy, for obligation is not measured by ability; God requires holiness, and holiness; is impossible.” “It may be safely assumed that no man living has ever seen a fellow man whom, even in the imperfect light in which a man reveals himself to his fellows, he deems perfect. And no sound-minded man can regard himself as perfect, unless he lowers the standard of judgment to suit his case” (Vol. III., p. 258).

If all this is true, hard indeed is the lot of mankind. It is the fable of Sisyphus forever rolling the stone up hill that can not reach the top. We are the unfortunate Sisyphius. Our character is the stone; holiness is the goal at the top of the mountain which can never be reached by any possible striving, but which we are commanded to reach; and on our quivering, straining back, paralyzed with inability, is laid the lash of moral obligation.

We might all cry out with one breath, “God pity us!” But no; God himself is the hard master who drives us to attempt the impossible feat and pitilessly swings the lash! There is nothing for us here but a life of hopeless sinning, and consequent agony of heart, for which all the blood of Christ affords no adequate help, no healing balm. To ask or command men to be holy, or to strive for holiness under such conditions would be as vain as it would be to urge them to pray, while you solemnly assure them that no prayer ever was, or ever can be, answered. Men holding such doctrines may become sanctified, but it is not likely; and if they do, it will be in spite of their philosophy and not on account of it.

Upon this false teaching, bolstered up by a famous catechism which multitudes still reverence as if inspired, President Mahan made these apt observations: “Let us now contemplate the iron bands of theological dogma, bands in which the convert so often finds himself fast bound, bands, which render the normal growth of the new-born soul as impossible as does the iron shoe that binds the foot of the female infant among the Chinese. Take two or three of these dogmas as examples: ‘No man is able, either of himself or by any grace received in this life, perfectly to keep the commandments of God, but daily doth break them in thought, word, and deed.’ Thus the convert is started on his course with a professed revelation from God, that he has no power, either of himself or from any grace vouchsafed in this life, to render the obedience required of him, on the one hand, and that, as a matter of fact, he will, on the other, every day of his life break these requirements ‘in thought. word, and deed.’ As a matter of course, he must ‘make God a liar,’ that is, discredit His revealed Word, or utterly dismiss from mind and thought all expectation and rational intention to render obedience. To aim at such obedience, in the case of one who holds such sentiments, is but to attempt and aim at a revealed and acknowledged impossibility. One of the most irrational and absurd purposes conceivable. “But what, according to these dogmas, is the state of the believer when he does sin? Listen to the answer ‘True believers, by reason of the unchangeable love of God and his decree and covenant to give them perseverance, … can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace.’ … ‘Nevertheless they may, through the temptations of Satan and the world, the prevalence of corruption remaining in them, and the neglect of the means of preservation, fall into grievous sins, and for a time continue therein; whereby they incur God’s displeasure, and grieve his Holy Spirit, come to be deprived of some of their graces and comforts, have their hearts hardened and their consciences wounded, hurt and scandalize others and bring temporal judgments upon themselves.’ “Thus the young convert is taught that he can not receive grace sufficient to obey God, but must daily sin in thought, word, and deed, yet he has a divine assurance that, however he sins, he will not utterly fall away from God. This I affirm in the fear of God, and as my absolute belief, that if it had been left wholly to the Old Serpent to frame dogmas and mould a religious sentiment for the education of the Lord’s sons and daughters, he would not have desired or asked that one ‘ jot or tittle ‘ should he taken from or added to those under consideration. What could God do more to insure in every new-born soul a backsliding life, than to require of it all absolute belief that it will sin, sin ‘daily in thought, word, and deed,’ sin nobody knows in what form and to what extent, but that no form or degree of sin it can by any possibility commit will imperil its immortal interests? If the purpose of the framers of such dogmas was to render the churches, in the language of a distinguished Presbyterian minister in the United States, ‘a hospital for invalids and a refuge for scoundrels,’ how could they frame a system better adapted to the purpose?” (Mahan’s Autobiography, pp. 9093).

The most blighting heresy that the father of lies ever introduced into a Christian creed is the absurd dogma that, in order to induce and perpetuate in God’s children humbleness of mind, He must leave in the depths of their hearts an abyss of moral corruption and death, a mass of ‘foolish and hurtful lusts’ to ‘war in their members’” (p. 106). “While believers regard it as a revealed truth of God, that they will in fact, ‘sin daily in thought, word, and deed,’ the exercise of faith to be ‘sanctified wholly,’ and ‘saved to the uttermost,’ becomes an utter impossibility” (p. 319).

Yet this monstrous and irrational heresy has been framed into a creed and defended by learned theologians till a whole denomination has been drugged and wrapped in the slumber of guilty acquiescence in a life of shortcoming, as if it were a divinely revealed necessity. The few Calvinists who have received the baptism with the Holy Ghost, and a marvelous degree of saintliness, like Jonathan Edwards and his wife, and George Whitefield, and William Tennant, and David Brainerd, have done so in spite of this stupefying doctrine of “necessary sinfulness.” They practically got away from their creed, and their mind dwelt chiefly upon helpful truths which the Spirit used to their sanctification.

President Finney, than whom no man of the century has been more revered by the writer, and no other has exercised a greater influence upon his life, as we have seen, held a peculiar theory of sin and depravity, denying that man’s nature was depraved. All sin was in the wrong use of the will; moral quality could be affirmed of nothing else. He also held a peculiar theory of the will which has been adopted as the Oberlin view, called the “unity or simplicity of moral action.” According to this theory, there can be no mixed character. “A man can not he holy and sinful at the same time.” A man’s obedience is entire, or he does not obey at all. “It is nonsense to speak of a holiness that consists with sin.” It would, of course, follow that every moral agent is always “as sinful or holy as with their knowledge they can be.” Regeneration is an “instantaneous” change “from entire sinfulness to entire holiness.” “The only sense in which obedience can be partial is that obedience may be intermittent.” The only thing to be expected of sanctification, then, is a confirmation of the will in its right choice. “All true saints, while in a state of acceptance with God, do actually render, for the time being, full obedience to all the known requirements of God; that is, they do for the time being their whole duty — all that God, at this time, requires of them.”

President Fairchild, the latest exponent of these views who has published, says: “One of the most obvious consequences of the doctrine is, that conversion is entire consecration (sanctification); that the earliest obedience of the converted sinner is entire obedience, and that his moral state is entirely approved of God.”

There is something wrong with this philosophy, for its conclusions are at war with Scripture, consciousness and universal experience. 1. It locates all sin in the attitude of the will, and accepts but one Scriptural definition of it — “Sin is the transgression of the law” — of course, a willful act of disobedience. But the Scripture has two other definitions of sin: “All unrighteousness is sin,” and “whatsoever is not of faith is sin.”

There is a vast realm in the nature of man that lies back of the will in his thoughts, feelings, imaginations, passions, appetites, and desires, of which our own enlightened conscience and the law of holiness take cognizance.

In regeneration we receive forgiveness of sin and adoption into the divine household; the power of sin is broken, the tyrant is dethroned and his reign ceases in the soul; yet sin is not so destroyed as not to leave his mark upon the soul, and even yet struggle for the mastery. However clear may be the perception of duty, and