Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org

We might fill this volume with extracts from leading men in the Presbyterian, Congregational,
Baptist, Methodist, and other Churches, giving no uncertain sound on this subject. Presidents Mahan
and Finney, Professor Cowles and D. L. Moody, of the Congregational Church; Albert Barnes, Dr.
Cuyler, and Dr. Chapman, of the Presbyterian Church; Spurgeon, Gordon, Murray, and Meyer, of
the Baptist Church; Bishops Janes, Peck, and Foster, and Drs. Keen and Steele, of the Methodist
Episcopal Church; and Lovick and George F. Pierce, and Morris, and Mahan, and others, of our own
Church -- these, and many more, have deplored the weakness and worldliness and inefficiency of
God's people, because of their lack of the Pentecostal baptism of purity and love and power that is
offered to her.
Is not the following, written by a distinguished Congregationalist, as true today as it was when
he wrote it quite a while ago? He says:
"The standard of piety throughout the American Church is extremely and deplorably low. It is low
compared with that of the primitive Church, compared with the provisions of the gospel, with the
obligations of redeemed sinners, or with the requisite qualifications for the work to be done. The
spirit of the world has deeply pervaded and largely engrossed the heart of the Church. Go through
the land and estimate her unconsecrated wealth, measure the energy of worldliness and the apathy
of love and prayer, for the proof. There is an extensive public sentiment which repels the subject of
personal holiness, hears it named with fear, discusses it with sensitive apprehensions of excess, or
even treats it with sarcasm."
A recent writer sums up the opinion of several leading men of the different Churches, referred to
above, in these words: "They all agree that there is a great need, pressing, urgent, awful! -- the need
of such a personal baptism of the Holy Ghost as shall bring holiness and power to the Churches and
the ministry."
Is not the following from Dr. A. T. Pierson too true? He says:
"The world has come into the Church in such a fashion that the Church has become composed of
one-half wholly worldly people, and the other half of worldly holy people, so that if you do not have
a chance to consult the Church roll, you cannot tell who belongs and who does not. How many
people in our modern Churches practically know whether there is a Holy Ghost or not?"
Joseph Cook is represented as saying that "the great need of the world is the Christianizing of
Christianity." And are not too many of the ministers of the present day like Dr. Steele says he was
before he embraced this theory and sought this blessing? In speaking of himself [in the third person],
he says:
"Before his eyes were anointed he saw not, in the provisions of the atonement, the blessing of the
fullness of Christ as a sharply defined transition in Christian experience -- an instantaneous work of
the Spirit by faith only, as taught by Wesley. Embracing the plausible theory of the gradual unfolding
of the spiritual life without any sudden uplift by the power of the Spirit, he criticized, without the
charity that is kind, the professors of the grace, magnifying their imperfections, stigmatizing them
as fanatics, and 'pluperfects,' and judging them all by an occasional glaring hypocrisy, or by the