Now, we all recognize this emotional element only as a helpful factor in religion, but not a permanent element. I have seen a few men accept Christ without any emotion whatever. I remember a blue-eyed, fair complexioned man saying, “I have no especial emotion. I am truly sorry for my sins. I confess them now and here, and I claim 1 John 1:9, 'If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.' I ask God to cleanse me. I need it and accept it, because He has said so.” Tracy lived all right as long as we knew of him. If converts made in evangelistic meetings were taken into careful Bible school, they would develop into useful Christians, and there would be no backsliding.
Now, religion, in the sense in which we use it, is a “building” process, not “inflation,” as the aeronaut would inflate his balloon. We all know the class of religionists who hop, jump and shout in religious meetings; they are so busy they do not see the basket as it passes; they give no money, they do nothing that the world would call religious except these physical manifestations. They are intolerant to all who do not believe as they do, they are simply to be tolerated and petted along as deficients who mean well but cannot be counted as part of the great organized force of believers which God is using to bring about the kingdom of God until by training and experience they can be used among their own class. But, among these, every now and then there comes a man of good mentality but without education, whom God can use. His church has no room for him, yet he has the same orders that Jesus gave to the eleven, “Go ye and preach the gospel to every nation,” and we find him preaching on the side streets, later a hall or church is hired, and we have a new sect.
You remember Jane Addams tells of the young college graduate who had taken a course in a Bible training school and in a school of philanthropy, who, on her return home, asked the rector for religious work, and he replied, “You might arrange the flowers on the pulpit each Sunday.” Think of that to a soul aflame with God!
Macaulay touches off this kind of blindness in his essay on “Ranke's History of the Popes,” in this way: “Far different is the policy of Rome. The ignorant enthusiasts whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy, and, whatever the learned and polite may think, a most dangerous enemy, the Catholic Church makes a champion; she bids him nurse his beard, covers him with a gown and hood of coarse dark stuff, ties a rope around his waist, and sends him forth to teach in her name. He costs her nothing. He takes not a ducat away from the revenues of her beneficed clergy. He lives by the alms of those who respect his spiritual character and are grateful for his instructions. He preaches not exactly in the style of Massillon, but in a way which moves the passions of the uneducated hearers, and all his influence is employed to strengthen the church of which he is a minister. To that Church he becomes as strongly attached as any of the cardinals, whose scarlet carriages and liveries crowd the entrance of the palace on the Quirinal. In this way the Church of Rome unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent. Even for female agencies there is a place in her system for devout women; she assigns them spiritual functions, dignities and magistracies.”