My attention was directed a few days past to some words on this subject which I venture here to transcribe, as a solemn and timely warning at this moment.
A carnal evangelism produces a scoffing worldliness, which refuses henceforth to listen to the solid gospel of the grace of God. To popularize the gospel is to take away from it every element of divine power which it possesses. Allow of human methods or ingredients, and immediately the flesh breathes freely and listens pleasantly, but bring in Christ crucified as doing away with man in the flesh altogether, and going on with the second Man, who is risen and gone into heaven, and the flesh is choked by the heaviness of the atmosphere, and makes its escape.
This modern popularizing of the gospel has given even evangelical society its itching ears, and has turned away the thoughtful from listening to the word as a divine thing. Thus the evangelical conspired with the rationalistic to ruin the whole crop and reduce the field to barrenness. ‘The land was as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.’ A rationalized college, and a popularized gospel, have made the name of Christ odious, and the holy scriptures a suspected and distrusted book.
What is here set forth very forcibly and aptly, is assuredly worthy of solemn consideration at this moment when the tide is rapidly flowing in the direction indicated, and when there seems spread abroad on every hand, as the morning upon the mountains, a mist of earth and deep delusion of the devil, so insidious and ensnaring, that but few have the power to discern the counterfeit coin, which a deeply designed imitation hides from them; and when the great mass of people are carried away by the blasphemous buffoonery and burlesque of modern evangelism. May the Lord open the eyes of His saints to the workings of the enemy in this “last hour” of His great patience and forbearance.