Page:Sermon at the Church Congress 1902.djvu/6

2 tracks have come. Perhaps there are reasons which at this time point to the need and to the hope of some such disclosure. For I feel pretty sure that there is among us a sense of discouragement. We doubt whether we are making way. There is a sense that we are not on the flow of the tide, and perhaps feel its ebb. We look back over religious history, and discern the difference, more clear than the reasons of it, between times of spiritual movement and awakening, and those which are stagnant and uninspired. We know that we have had immediately behind us times of the former kind. We ask ourselves whether we may be entering upon one of the latter. We complain to each other of prevalent indifference to religion. We note the breakdown of pious custom and wholesome restraints. We do not feel, among religious people themselves, a countervailing depth and earnestness. If we have ourselves felt the strength of one of the great religious movements, we recognize with sorrow that it does not hold men as it did. The sons of the Evangelical revival or of the Oxford Movement look alike for the old fervour, the old intensity, the well-defined characteristics, and sadly own that they do not find what they did. They feel the loss in themselves, and they think that they observe it in others. Differing between themselves in other things, they agree in this discouragement. It is keener, perhaps, from the very fact that religious activity of all sorts is so various, so strong, and almost feverish amongst us, just because in so many ways the experiments have been tried and the means used which we had hoped would increase the Church's grip upon her work and affect most for good the religion of the nation.

If I am right, your own thoughts will answer to what I say and be the best witness to it. Anyhow, after submitting to you my own impressions, I pass on to ask what, in face of such a condition, we ought to do and to think?

First, surely, to own it humbly. Here, as elsewhere, grumbling and whining do not help. If there are generations to whom God, in His mysterious wisdom, gives more, and others to whom He gives less of His Spirit's power, and if He should have set us in one of the latter, this is, so far as it is independent of ourselves, a matter for humble submission. Only such humility must have in it no grain of apathy. On one side it must deepen into penitence. Can we doubt that we are largely to blame? Have we taken as matters of course what were really exceptional gifts of God? Are we blinder because we have seen? Have the works done among us by greater than human power left our heart as a generation or a Church harder? History has its precedents for such things to wake our alarm. The relapse into apostasy after Josiah's reformation; the over-clouding within half a century of the light that was flashed from Assisi upon the conscience of the Middle Age; the awful coldness of the mid-eighteenth century, following on all the