Читать книгу One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, Tome 1 - John Williamson Nevin - Страница 14

Nature of Quackery.—To rely on forms or measures shows inward weakness.—“New Measures” a substitute for true strength.—Where they are in honor, ample space is found for novices and quacks.

It has been shown that the successful use of the Anxious Bench calls for no spiritual power. It is within the reach of fanaticism and error to be employed in their service, with as much facility as it may be enlisted in the service of truth. It is no argument of strength, as is often imagined, that a preacher is able to use such an agency with effect. I now go to a step farther and pronounce it an argument of spiritual weakness that he should find it either necessary or desirable to call in such help. There is a measure of quackery in the expedient, which always implies the want of strength, so far as it may be relied on at all, as being of material account in carrying on the work of God.135

Quackery consists in pretension to an inward virtue or power, which is not possessed in fact, on the ground of a mere show of the strength which such power or virtue is supposed to include. The self-styled physician who, without any knowledge of the human frame, undertakes to cure diseases by a sovereign panacea in the shape of fluid, powder, or pill, is a quack; and there is no doubt abundance of quackery in the medical profession, under more professional forms, where practice is conducted without any true professional insight and power. Such practice may at times seem eminently successful, and yet it is quackery notwithstanding. The same false show of power may, of course, come into view in every department of life. It makes up in fact a large part of the action and business of the world. Quack lawyers, quack statesmen, quack scholars, quack teachers, quack gentlemen, quacks in a word of every name and shape, meet us plentifully in every direction.136 We need not be surprised, then, to find the evil fully at home also in the sphere of religion. Indeed it might seem to be more at home here than anywhere else. Here especially the heart of man, “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” has shown itself most ingenious in all ages in substituting the shadow for the reality, the form for the substance, the outward for the inward. The religion of the world has always been, for the most part, arrant quackery. Paganism can exist under no other form. The mummery of Rome, as aping powers of a higher order, is the most stupendous system of quackery the world has ever witnessed. But quackery in the Church is not confined of course to Rome. Christianity, in its very nature, must ever act on the corrupt nature of man as a powerful stimulus to the evil. No system embraces such powers, inward, deep and everlasting. These man would fain appropriate and make his own, in an external way, without relinquishing himself, and entering soul and body that sphere of the Spirit in which alone they can be understood and felt. So Simon Magus dreamed of purchasing the gift of God, and clothing himself with it in the way of outward possession. He was a quack; the prototype and prince of evangelical quacks. The second century shows us the whole Christian world brilliantly illuminated with rival systems of quackery under the name of Gnosticism,137 which for a time seemed to darken the sun of truth itself by their false but powerful glare. Afterwards, under a less idealistic garb, the evil fairly enthroned itself in the Church. The Reformation was the resurrection of the Truth once more, in its genuine and original life. Luther was no quack. But Protestantism itself soon had its quacks again in plentiful profusion, and has them all the world over at the present day. Christianity, as of old, serves to call the false spirit continually into action. Some whole sects stand only in the element of quackery. And among all sects it is easy to find the same element to some extent actively at work; sometimes under one form, and sometimes under another; but always exalting the outward at the cost of the inward and promising in the power of the flesh what can never be accomplished except in the power of the spirit.

Wherever forms in religion are taken to be—we will not say the spiritual realities themselves with which the soul is concerned, for the error in that shape would be too gross—but the power and force at least by which these realities are to be apprehended, without regard to their own invisible virtue, there we have quackery in the full sense of the term. Religion must have forms, as well as an inward living force. But these can have no value, no proper reality, except as they spring perpetually from the presence of that living force itself. The inward must be the bearer of the outward. Quackery, however, reverses the case. The outward is made to bear the inward. The shrine, consecrated with the proper ceremonies, must become a shechinah. Forms have a virtue in them to bind and rule the force of things. Such forms may be exhibited in a ritual, or in a creed, or in a scheme of a religious experience mechanically apprehended; but in the end the case is substantially the same. It is quackery in the garb of religion without its inward life and power.138

That old forms are liable to be thus abused, and have been extensively thus abused in fact, is easily admitted. But it is not always recollected that new forms furnish precisely the same opportunity for the same error. It is marvelous indeed how far this seems to be overlooked by the zealous advocates of the system of New Measures in our own day. They propose to rouse the Church from its dead formalism. And to do this effectually, they strike off from the old ways of worship, and bring in new and strange practices that are adapted to excite attention. These naturally produce a theatrical effect, and this is taken at once for an evidence of waking life in the congregation. One measure, losing its power in proportion as it becomes familiar, leads to the introduction of another. A few years since a sermon was preached and published by a somewhat distinguished revivalist, in which the ground was openly taken that there must be a constant succession of new measures in the Church, to keep it alive and awake; since only in this way could we hope to counteract permanently the force of that spiritual gravitation, by which the minds of men are so prone continually to sink towards the earth in the sphere of religion.139 The philosophy this precisely by which the Church of Rome, from the fourth century downward, was actuated in all her innovations. Her worship was designed to make up through the flesh what was wanting in the spirit. The friends of new measures affect to be more free than others from the authority of mere forms. They wish not to be fettered and cramped by ordinary methods. And yet none make more account in fact of forms. They discard old forms, only to trust the more blindly in such as are new. Their methods are held to be all-sufficient for awakening sinners and effecting their conversion! They have no faith in ordinary pastoral ministrations, comparatively speaking; no faith in the Catechism. Converts made in this way are regarded with suspicion. But they have great faith in the Anxious Bench and its accompaniments. Old measures they hold to be in their very nature unfriendly to the spirit of revivals—they are the “letter that killeth”—but new measures “make alive.”140 And yet they are measures when all is done; and it is only by losing sight of the inward power of truth that any can be led to attach to them any such importance.

To rely upon the Anxious Bench, to be under the necessity of having recourse to new measures of any sort to enlist attention or produce effect in the work of the gospel, shows a want of inward spiritual force. If it be true that old forms are dead and powerless in a minister’s hands, the fault is not in the forms, but in the minister himself; and it is the very impotence of quackery to think of mending the case essentially by the introduction of new forms. The man who had no power to make himself felt in the catechetical class is deceived most assuredly and deceives others when he seems to be strong in the use of the anxious bench. Let the power of religion be present in the soul of him who is called to serve at the altar, and no strange fire will be needed to kindle the sacrifice. He will require no new measures. His strength will appear rather in resuscitating, and clothing with their ancient force the institutions and services already established for his use. The freshness of a divine life, always young and always new, will stand forth to view in forms that before seemed sapless and dead.141 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 his practice disturbed. And how natural that weakness, under every form, should rejoice to take refuge in the shelter thus brought within its reach.

It should be considered a calamity in any community, or in any religious denomination, to have this system in fashionable and popular use. Let the idea prevail that those who employ new measures in the gospel work are the friends pre-eminently of serious heart religion, and of all evangelical interests; whilst such as frown upon them are to be regarded with suspicion, as at best but half awake in the service of Christ. Let it be counted enough to authenticate the power of a pastor’s ministrations that he shall be able to furnish, from winter to winter, a flaming report of some three weeks’ awakening in his charge, in the course of which scores of sinners have been drawn to the anxious bench, and immediately afterwards hurried to the Lord’s table. Let some religious paper, known as the organ of the Church, herald these reports, from week to week, without inquiry or discrimination, as “revival intelligence,” proclaiming them worthy of all confidence, and glorifying both the measures and the men concerned in the triumphs they record. Let those who are counted “pillars in the church” give their sanction to the same judgment, openly honoring the new system, or quietly conniving at what they may not entirely approve, so as by their very cautions and exceptions to forward the whole interest in fact. Let the sentiment be industriously cherished that with this interest is identified in truth the cause of revivals itself, and that lukewarmness, and dead orthodoxy, and indifference, if not absolute hostility, towards prayer-meetings, missionary efforts, and all good things, characterize as a matter of course all who refuse to do it homage. Let this state of things hold with respect to the subject, and it needs no great discernment to see that it is likely to work disastrously upon the character and fortunes of the Church so circumstanced. The attention of ministers will be turned away from more important, but less ostentatious methods of promoting religion. Preaching will become shallow. The catechism may be possibly still treated with professed respect, but practically it will be shorn of its honor and force. Education may be considered to some extent necessary for the work of the ministry, but in fact no great care will be felt to have it either thorough or complete. Ignorance, sciolism, and quackery will lift up the head on all sides and show themselves off as the “great power of God.” Novices will abound, “puffed up with pride,” each wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason. Young men, candidates for the sacred office, will be encouraged to try their hand at the new system before they have well commenced their studies, and finding that they have power to make themselves felt in this way, will yield their unfledged judgment captive to its charms, so as to make no account afterwards of any higher form of strength. Study and the retired cultivation of personal holiness will seem to their zeal an irksome restraint; and making their lazy, heartless course of preparation as short as possible, they will go out with the reputation of educated ministers, blind leaders of the blind, to bring the ministry into contempt, and fall themselves into the condemnation of the devil. Whatever arrangements may exist in favor of a sound and solid system of religion, their operation will be to a great extent frustrated and defeated by the predominant influence of a sentiment, practically adverse to the very object they are designed to reach.

Thus will the ministry be put, more or less, out of joint by the force of the wrong judgment involved in the system of New Measures, where it has come to be fashionable and popular. The Church must suffer corresponding harm, of course, in all her interests. The old landmarks grow dim. Latitudinarian views gain ground. Fanatical tendencies gather strength. The ecclesiastical body is swelled with heterogeneous elements loosely brought together and actuated by no common life, except sectarian bigotry may be entitled to such name. False views of religion abound. Conversion is everything, sanctification nothing. Religion is not regarded as the life of God in the soul that must be cultivated in order that it may grow, but rather as a transient excitement to be renewed from time to time by suitable stimulants presented to the imagination. A taste for noise and rant supersedes all desire for solid knowledge. The susceptibility of the people for religious instruction is lost on the one side, along with the capacity of the ministry to impart religious instruction on the other. The details of Christian duty are but little understood or regarded. Apart from its seasons of excitement, no particular church is expected to have much power. Family piety and the religious training of the young are apt to be neglected.

It is a calamity, then, in the general view of the case now taken, for a community to be drawn into the vortex of this system as a reigning fashion. The occasional use of it might be comparatively safe, in some hands, perhaps, without harm altogether. But let it be in credit and reputation for a short time on a given field, and its action will be found to be just as mischievous as has now been described. It will prove the refuge of weakness and the resort of quacks. It will be a “wide and effectual door” to let in fanaticism and error. It will be as a worm at the root of the ministry, silently consuming its strength; and as a mildew on the face of congregations and churches, beneath whose blighting presence no fruit can be brought to perfection.

135. It has been found convenient with some, it would seem, to misunderstand what is said of spiritual weakness and spiritual strength in this part of the tract. They affect to take it as having respect to intellect, learning, eloquence, &c.; as though it implied that men of ordinary or small abilities are entitled to no respect in the Church; and so we are referred to Paul’s “Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty,” &c. 1 Cor i. 26–28, as a scriptural rebuke upon every such judgment. Thus also the editor of the Lutheran Observer, Jan. 5, 1844, lugs in by the neck a passage to the same purpose by President Edwards to show that this “great master-spirit did not look upon the inward weakness of his co-workers as a matter of reproach.” At the close of it he gravely adds; “This quotation needs no comment from us; it speaks for itself. All we ask is to compare it with Dr. N.’s labored effort about the oft-repeated ‘inward weakness’ of revival preachers in the present day [“‘The Anxious Bench by Rev. J. W. Nevin, D. D.’: Contrasted with ‘Edwards on Revivals’, No. IX,” Lutheran Observer 11, no. 18 (January 5, 1844), 3].” Now if there be anything plain in the whole tract, it is that the inward weakness attributed by it, not to revival preachers, but to such as glory in the system of the Bench, is that of the “flesh” mainly as opposed to the strength which is from God’s Spirit. When I am weak, says Paul, then am I strong. Quackery affects to be strong, but is weak in fact. Its weakness does not stand in the measure of its own resources so much as in its separation from the ground of all strength in God.

136. [For a parallel and contemporaneous critique of universal “quackery” in American culture, see David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 471–72.]

137. [Early Christian heresies that sought gnosis, mystical truth known only to a spiritual elite. For background, see the notes to Antichrist, below.]

138. [For an earlier version of this argument, see “The Grand Heresy,” 246–47; repr., New Mercersburg Review, no. 17, 48–53; summarized by Layman, general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, 17).]

139. [Finney believed “Without new measures it is impossible that the church should succeed in gaining the attention of the world to religion. There are so many exciting subjects constantly before the public mind . . . that the church cannot maintain her ground, cannot command attention, without very exciting preaching, and sufficient novelty in measures, to get the public ear (Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 258).”]

140. [2 Cor 3:6.]

141. [As succinct a summary as one can find of what Nevin would call “the mystical presence.” Layman summarizes Nevin’s early understanding of this spirituality in his general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, 16–19.]

142. [1 Cor 2:4.]

143. [Acts 19:13–15.]

144. Whitefield and Edwards! exclaim the champions of the Bench; they were both thorough going New Measure men, and it is a slander upon their names to speak of them as belonging to the opposite interest. Now it is not said here that they tolerated no new things in the worship of God; but only that they needed nothing of this sort to make themselves felt. What was new, in their case, was not sought; it came of itself, the free natural result of the power it represented. Whitefield had recourse to new methods himself to some extent, and Edwards carried his toleration of such things far in favor of others; but in neither instance could it be said that any value was attached to what was thus out of the common way, for its own sake, or as something to be aimed at with care and design beforehand. The judgment of Edwards in this case moreover, it should be remembered, as given in his Thoughts on the Revival in New England, had respect to the particular things it sanctions, not in a general way, but as related to an extraordinary work of God, of great extent and long continuance, most amply authenticated on other grounds. It is a widely different case when we are required to accept such things on their own credit as the evidence of a revival, or as the power of which it is to be secured. [Both Nevin and advocates of the new measures had some justification in their arguments: Whitefield and Edwards were Calvinists, and held that revival was the result of God’s supernatural activity in the church. It was this assumption that Finney denied. At the same time, the revivalist techniques of Whitefield, when transmuted into an Arminian key by Finney, became the new measures Nevin abhorred. See the explanation of the process in Layman, general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, 8–12.]

145. [Scriptural references are, in order: 1 Tim 3:2; Titus 1:7–8; 1 Tim 3:4; Titus 1:9; 1 Tim 6:11; 4:12; 2 Tim 2:24, 3, 15.]