THE EVANGELICAL MAGAZINE AND MISSIONARY CHRONICLE. MAY, 1873. Religious Rebibal-its Nature, and the Need for it.* THE accomplished author of "Philip Van Artevelde " says very truly— "He that lacks time to mourn lacks time to mend : Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure For life's worst ills to have no time to feel them." It is a hopeful sign that in very many sections of the Church of Christ there is a sense, deep and sincere, of the comparative loss of energy. The lamentation is both wide and earnest. Neither Wesleyans, Baptists, nor Independents are gathering openly and with songs of thanksgiving the sheaves into the garner. The Bishop of Manchester in his charge last December made a similar confession of his own community, though he does not express it with as much emphasis as was employed at the Leeds Church Congress, in October. The almost universally admitted fact is almost universally deplored. It is only here and there you can meet with a man who rejoices over the decay of spiritual vitality in other communions than his own. Believing as we do that there are diversities of operations, we regard with unfeigned regret spiritual apathy wherever it may appear. It is our happiness, not our grief, to believe that when one portion of the Church shall receive anew the breath of heaven others also shall be wafted on their way by the selfsame gale. But of course our direct and first responsibility lies at home. Nothing has occurred to shake our conviction, but very much to deepen it, that we have had assigned to us by the Head of the Church a most * A paper read before the Manchester Congregational Board of Ministers on the 3rd February last by the Chairman, the Rev. Thomas Green, M.A., of Ashton-under-Lyne. THE EVANGELICAL MAGAZINE AND MISSIONARY CHRONICLE. MAY, 1873. Religious Rebibal-its Nature, and the Need for it.* THE accomplished author of "Philip Van Artevelde" says very truly "He that lacks time to mourn lacks time to mend : Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure For life's worst ills to have no time to feel them." It is a hopeful sign that in very many sections of the Church of Christ there is a sense, deep and sincere, of the comparative loss of energy. The lamentation is both wide and earnest. Neither Wesleyans, Baptists, nor Independents are gathering openly and with songs of thanksgiving the sheaves into the garner. The Bishop of Manchester in his charge last December made a similar confession of his own community, though he does not express it with as much emphasis as was employed at the Leeds Church Congress, in October. The almost universally admitted fact is almost universally deplored. It is only here and there you can meet with a man who rejoices over the decay of spiritual vitality in other communions than his own. Believing as we do that there are diversities of operations, we regard with unfeigned regret spiritual apathy wherever it may appear. It is our happiness, not our grief, to believe that when one portion of the Church shall receive anew the breath of heaven others also shall be wafted on their way by the selfsame gale. But of course our direct and first responsibility lies at home. Nothing has occurred to shake our conviction, but very much to deepen it, that we have had assigned to us by the Head of the Church a most * A paper read before the Manchester Congregational Board of Ministers on the 3rd February last by the Chairman, the Rev. Thomas Green, M.A., of Ashton-under-Lyne. important and honourable work in connection with the spiritual history of the country. We are sure that if our spiritual power is gone all is gone, and we had better cease to be. Our security, on the human side of it, is the being true to ourselves. We are habitually to foster that high Christian sentiment and that New Testament unsecular spirit which we came into existence to uphold. From the vigour we love to cultivate and the philanthropy our principles require we cannot but be amongst the foremost in all the great ecclesiastical and social reforms of our day; but none the less-indeed all the more-must we remember our directly spiritual and evangelical mission. We must watch with never-flagging solicitude the ebb and the flow of that Divine life within us, apart from which we are but "as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal." The subject of Religious Revival is one that we do well, by repeated consideration, to keep before our minds. Happily it does occupy the thoughts and feelings of a large number of our ministers and our people. We are not amongst those who believe that feeble, hoping, fearing, erring man cannot speak to the unseen and the eternal God, nor do we doubt that God can and does speak to the creature He has made. We believe in Divine communications to the soul; and however closely they may be connected with material agencies, such communications are most truly spiritual, and do not belong to that region of our existence over which there hangs the sentence, " dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." We do well to make vivid to all who may observe that our philosophy is not summed up in any of those theories to which the term materialistic can be applied. We believe in a personal God. We are sure that the Lord Jesus Christ still walks amongst His churches; that He is as truly in London, in Manchester, in Glasgow, as He was in Thyatira, in Sardis, or in Jerusalem. We believe in the Holy Ghost. We live in the dispensation of the Comforter; and if at times we seek with exceptional earnestness the manifestation of the Spirit's power we evince our faith in Father, Son, and Spirit. And we doubt not that our faith shall grow as it is exercised, and shall at the same time impart itself to others. Every important movement in the world and in the Church shows the infectious character of earnestness, and it is on the central verities of our faith that our solicitude is the deepest. We hold by our modes of church government; but most of all we believe in a God of power and of love, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. He was no more present with Moses at the burning bush, with Elijah in the still small voice, with John in the revelations in Patmos, than He is with His faithful ones at this hour. He is more than all our modes and methods, forms and governments-more than our ignorance, our speculations, our hopes, our fragments and particles of truth. |