One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1. John Williamson Nevin
Attention will be engaged; interest excited; souls drawn to the sanctuary. Sinners will be awakened and born into the family of God. Christians will be builded up in faith, and made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light. Religion will grow and prosper. This is the true idea of evangelical power. But let a preacher be inwardly weak, though ambitious at the same time of making an impression in the name of religion, and he will find it necessary to go to work in a different way. Old forms must needs be dull and spiritless in his hands. His sermons have neither edge nor point. The services of the sanctuary are lean and barren. He can throw no interest into the catechism. He has no heart for family visitation and no skill to make it of any account. Still he desires to be doing something in his spiritual vocation, to convince others and to satisfy himself that he is not without strength. What then is to be done? He must resort to quackery; not with clear consciousness, of course; but instinctively, as it were, by the pressure of inward want. He will seek to do by the flesh what he finds himself too weak to effect by the spirit. Thus it becomes possible for him to make himself felt. New measures fall in exactly with his taste, and are turned to fruitful account by his zeal. He becomes theatrical; has recourse to solemn tricks; cries aloud; takes strange attitudes; tells exciting stories; calls out the anxious, &c. In this way possibly he comes to be known as a revivalist, and is counted among those who preach the Gospel “with the demonstration of the Spirit and with power.”142 And yet when all is done he remains as before without true spiritual strength. New measures are the refuge of weakness.
There may be cases indeed in which genuine power will express itself in new forms. But when this occurs it will always be without ostentation or effort. Miracles are ever natural, as distinguished from mere wonderworks and feats of legerdemain. The form is the simple product of the power it represents, growing forth from it, and filled with it at every point. Where this is the case, what is new is at the same time free and entitled to our respect. But such instances can never authorize imitation where the same inward power is not present. Such imitation is quackery and an argument of weakness. Paul had power to wield the name of Jesus with effect for the expulsion of demons; but when the sons of Sceva, the Jew, undertook to exorcise in the same way, the demoniac fell upon them, and drove them naked and wounded from the house.143 They were quacks. Ezekiel prophesied in the valley of dry bones, and there was a noise and great shaking; but when a preacher, with nothing of Ezekiel’s strength, lays himself out to excite noise and bodily action, as though this must certainly include the breath of life, the whole business sinks into a solemn farce. The Spirit of God, on the day of Pentecost, came like a mighty rushing wind on the disciples in Jerusalem, causing them to speak with tongues; but when a religious meeting is turned into a babel, to make it pentecostal, it deserves to be reprobated as savoring more of hell than heaven. Life is always beautiful in its place; but hideous and ghastly are the muscular actings of a galvanized corpse. An apostrophe from the lips of Whitefield might thrill, like an electric shock, through a whole congregation, and yet be no better than a vulgar mountebank trick, as imitated by an ordinary revivalist, affecting to walk in his steps. An Edwards might so preach the truth as to force his hearers from their seats, and yet be no pattern whatever for those who with design and calculation call in the device of “decision acts,” as they are termed, to create a similar show of power. Whitefield and Edwards needed no new measures to make themselves felt.144 They were genuine men of God, who had strength from heaven in themselves. They were no quacks.
The system of New Measures then is to be deprecated, as furnishing a refuge for weakness and sloth in the work of the ministry, and in this way holding out a temptation, which, so far as it prevails, leads ministers to undervalue and neglect the cultivation of that true inward strength without which no measures can be at last of much account. This is a great evil.
It is a vastly more easy thing to carry forward the work of religion in this way than it is to be steadily and diligently true to the details of ministerial duty as prescribed by the apostle Paul: to be “vigilant, sober and of good behavior,” not “selfwilled, not soon angry . . . just, holy, temperate,” “one that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity,” “holding fast the faithful word in such sort that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and convince the gainsayers,” to “follow after righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness,” so as to be “an example of the believers in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity,” to be “gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves,” to meditate on divine things, and to be wholly given to them, so as to be continually profiting in the view of all, to “endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ,” to be a scribe well instructed in the law, “a workman that need not to be ashamed,”145 able to bring forth from the treasury of God’s word things new and old as they may be wanted, to preach week after week so as to instruct and edify the souls of men, to be earnest, faithful, pungent in the lecture room and catechetical class, to be known in the family visitation, in the sick chamber, in the dwelling places of poverty and sorrow, as the faithful pastor, “watching for souls,” whose very presence serves to remind men of holiness and heaven, not at certain seasons only, but from month to month, from one year always to another. All this is something great and difficult, and not to be compassed without a large amount of inward spiritual strength. But it calls for comparatively little power for a man to distinguish himself as a leader in periodical religious excitements, where zeal has room for outward display, and wholesale action is employed to discharge within a month the claims of a year. It is not asserted that a minister must be destitute of the qualifications that are required to make a regularly faithful and efficient pastor in order that he may be fitted to make himself conspicuous in this way; but most assuredly such may be the case. A man may be mighty in the use of new measures, preaching every day if need be for three weeks to crowded congregations, excited all the time; he may have the anxious bench filled at the close of each service and the whole house thrown into disorder; he may have groaning, shouting, clapping, screaming, a very bedlam of passion, all around the altar; and as the result of all, he may be able to report a hundred converts or more, translated by the process, according to his own account, from darkness into God’s marvelous light. He may be able to act the same part in similar scenes, at different places, in the course of a winter; and, for the time being, his name may be familiar to the lips of men as a revivalist, whose citizenship might be supposed to hold in the third heavens. All this may be where to an attentive observer it shall soon be painfully evident, at the same time that the true and proper strength of a man of God is wholly wanting. A man may so distinguish himself and yet have no power to study, think or teach. He may be crude, chaotic, without cultivation or discipline. He may be too lazy to read or write. There may be no power whatever in his ordinary walk or conversation to enforce the claims of religion. Meet him in common secular connections, and you will find him in a great measure unfelt in the stream of worldliness with which he is surrounded. Often he is covetous, often vain; often without a particle of humility or meekness. His zeal, too, seems to exhaust itself in each spasmodic “awakening” through which it is called to pass. The man who appeared to be all on fire for the salvation of souls, and ready to storm even the common proprieties of life for the sake of the gospel, shows himself now marvelously apathetic towards the whole interest. He has no heart to seize common opportunities, in the house or by the way, to say a word in favor of religion. It is well indeed if he be not found relaxing altogether his ministerial activity, both in the pulpit and from house to house. The truth is, he has no capacity, no inward sufficiency, for the ordinary processes of evangelical labor. Much is required to be a faithful minister of the New Testament, whilst small resources in comparison are needed for that semblance of power to which a man may attain by the successful use of the system now in view.
Here, then, is a strong temptation presented to ministers. They are in danger of being seduced by the appeals which this system makes to their selfishness and sloth. It offers to their view a “short method of doing God’s great work,” and a sort of “royal road,” at the same time, to ministerial reputation. How easy, in these circumstances, for even a good man to have his judgment warped and