ncy. What
with philosophical pessimism and social agitations and literary
decadence and political corruption and moral looseness, a great many
persons are beginning to feel that the end of the century is an end of
faith, and are not able to discern in the darkness of the time any
morning star. As one distinguished author has said: "This is not a
time of the eclipse of faith, but a time of the collapse of faith." It
was much the same in the times of Thyatira. There was the same luxury
and self-indulgence in the Roman world, the same social restlessness,
the same intellectual despondency. Now, who is it that can view these
perturbations of the world with a tranquil and rational hope? I
answer, that it is only he who views his own time in the light of the
eternal purposes of God. The religious man is bound to be an optimist,
not with the foolish optimism which blinks the facts of life; but with
the sober optimism which believes that--

"Step by step, since time began,
We see the steady gain of man."

It may be dark as pitch in the world of speculative thought, but
religion discerns the {101} morning star. It believes in its own time.
It believes that somehow "good will be the final goal of ill." Even in
the perplexities and disasters of its own experience it is not
overwhelmed. It is cast down, but not destroyed. It is saved by hope.
It lifts its eyes and beholds through the clouds the gleam of the
morning star.

{102}

XLI

LIVING AS DEAD

_Revelation_ iii. 1.

Was there ever a message of sterner irony than this to the Church of
Sardis: "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead"! We may
suppose that it was a church of apparent prosperity, with all the
machinery of church life, its ritual, and officers, and committees, all
in working order; and yet, when one got at the heart of it, there was
no vitality. It was a dead church. It could show--as the passage
says--no works fulfilled before God. It was like a tree which seems
all vigorous, but which, when one thrusts into the heart of it, proves
to be pervaded by dry-rot. There are plenty of such churches
still,--churches which have a name that they are living, but are dead.
They are counted in the denominational year-book; they go through the
motions of life; but where is their quickening, communicating,
vitalizing power? What are they but mechanical, formal, institutional
things, and how sudden sometimes, like {103} the falli