Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 January 1912 — ANOTHER LARGE AUDIENCE ATTENDED UNION SERVICE. [ARTICLE]

ANOTHER LARGE AUDIENCE ATTENDED UNION SERVICE.

Rev. Harper Delivered Sermon on the Needs of the Church —Music Continues Big Attraction. Another large audience attended th#union evangelistic service at the Presbyterian ehurch Tuesday night and following the song service list euea to a splendid sermon by Rev. C. L. Harper of the Trinity M. E. i-hurch. His subje--*' was “What the C hnrch Needs is e Heart Break or a Keen Sorrow for the Unsaved.” Je*r. 9:1; Heb. 5:7-8. He said: “Our trouble today is not the absence of culture or wealth ov brains. Our trouble is this: The nerve center of our evangelism has been interfered with and this has changed the attitude toward sin. Sin is not abhorred and shunned; there is no* fear of sin—no fear of God. Tol3toi said: “The mask of our time is a lost sense of God.’ Hence we hear no weeping over the sins of the people, there is no agony over sin. The church is affected by this drift. It has produced a state of indifference in our churches and the members are silent and inactive. Religion is action. The heart and soul of Christianity is action. I am more concerned about the saving of one soul than I am about all speculatlons about truth. It-" is death to any church to loed the sense of direct personal responsibility. “Gipsey Smith said, ‘There Is no agony now, there is no with sin; it is now a picnic, now a social.’ Jesu& never made it so. He preached repentance. He says the kingdom dugfereth violence.

The church still offers the message of saltation to the people, but somehow the force, the alarming, compelling cry of the message has weakened; there is something lacking and something is a positive and persistent preaching of the fearful fact that ‘whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.’ Rev. W. J. Dawson says that what the church needs today is not defenders of the faith, however eloquent or wise, but the actual spectacle of Christian lives which are wholly--distinct aiift distinguishable from the lives of worldly men; lives content and meek and laborious; lives consistently devoted to the service of mankind; lives that have taken the last step of complete surrender to the will of God. “Jesus’s passion was for a world—to win the world for God. Have we a gripping passion like that? Wesley had it. Livingston had it. St. Frances had it. Charles G. Finney and others who have moved men and women for the kingdom had it. When will the church be swept by this great emotion: into a serious and overwhelm* ing solicitude for the welfare of society? Not until this coldness or indifference to evangelistic fervor is gone, for the sublime purpose bf the Gospel.is to. bring God to man and man to God. Dr. Cuylor has said, ‘Woe to the World if the Gospel runs out.’ “It is not enough to please men or even to stir men. THEY MUST BE WION. Dr. Dawson tells the sad and thrilling story of Charles Pierce, who attained an infamous fame in England a few years ago as burglar and murderer; a man who seemed to be absolutely depraved In every way, as he was being led to the scaffold to expiate bis crimes under human law the prison chaplain offered him what are called the ‘consolations of religion.’ The wretched man turned upon him and said, ‘Do you believe it Do you believe it? If I believed that I could crawl across England on broken glass on my hands and knees to tell men it Was true.’ f “Again we spy, ‘What the Church Needs is a Heart Break.’ ”