The Revival Movement
image 1
image 2
image 3
image 4
cropped image 1
THE REVIVAL MOVEMENT.
The New York papers, which like the ancient Athenians are always on the qui vive1 to hear or to tell some new thing, are dilating on the religious revival by the page, just as they did on the Cunningham murder.2 One class of papers greedily avail themselves of the opportunity of ridiculing all religion, by making it responsible for the occasional fanaticism of some, and hypocrisy of others, of its professors, while other papers congratulate themselves and the public on the prospect of a general spread of sound morality and earnest piety as the fruit of the present excitement. Our own wishes are stronger than our hopes in this last respect.
There is a sad and fatal want of earnestness and sincerity in the religion of the day. Look at a thorough business man—we could name hundreds such. Meet him at any hour of the day or night, and his talk and his thoughts are of gains and cash; we doubt if he could talk five minutes without uttering the word “dollars.” So with the man of pleasure, his fast horses and various luxuries are ever present to his mind and are constantly alluded to in his conversation. But the religious man, the church member,—he leaves his religion behind him on quitting his pew Sunday evening, and resumes it not until his return there on the next Sunday morning. You may be in his company all the week, and be familiar with him through a course of years, without ever having reason to suppose that he is a church member. It is a pitiable but an indisputable fact, that while a man of business, or a “fast man,” display their tastes and habits of mind unmistakably in their whole career, the most men who profess religion keep their coats buttoned over it, so that it is only by accident, if at all, that you learn they profess to have any. If the revival movement cures this, by infusing the same earnestness into men’s practice of religion, which they already display in the pursuit of business, a great deal of good will be done, both to the individuals especially concerned, and to the community at large.