Article August 3, 1899 Issue

Current Religious Items

with contributions from Samuel M. Crothers

Is this generation of Christians unspiritual? We have been asked this question. Signs that this is an unspiritual age are often pointed out: the fewness of additions to the churches, declining attendance at public worship, growing indifference to the Lord's Day, vanishing family altars, decrease of private devotion. An English bishop, after a recent visitation of his diocese, found evidence that interest in the churches had fallen off extensively during the last twenty years. He noted three chief causes: devotion to amusements, ambition to increase property rather than to improve character, and engrossing interest in secular studies with the chief purpose to get gain through better disciplined minds. He thought the public schools fostered this aim. It will be conceded by many that the controlling desire of the Christian world to-day is not to attain to the spiritual life.

What is spirituality? It is seeing and knowing God, who is a spirit. It is living under the control of the impulses which guided the Son of God in the flesh. Paul was a profoundly spiritual man because his constant experience was described by his saying, "I live: and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me." Spirituality depends on the sense of the reality of the spiritual world. When the commands of God, His revelation, and even His existence, are subjects of speculation, the life cannot be illumined by His presence or responsive to it.—The Congregationalist.

I shall ask you to turn, for the present, from the human to the divine side of our work—from our use of the power which God has entrusted to us as His ministers and deputies of His use of it for the advancement of His kingdom on earth.

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