quotes, although he adds “females”; the editor has added the first two sets of single quotes].
What a coincidence of judgment, among the critics of the tract, at this point! And what shall we say of the relevancy and honesty of the criticism itself, in view of the passage thus censured, as it actually stands, and taken in its plain sense? This is a fair specimen, however, of a large part of all that has been argued against the tract in these publications. [For a further argument that the “Awakenings” introduced an “emotional appeal” into the conversion experience, see Layman, general introduction to Born of Water and the Spirit, 8–10.]
131. [Presbyterian pastors Thomas Campbell (1763–1854) and son, Alexander (1788–1866), sought the unification of Christians into a single body patterned after the New Testament church. In order to restore the New Testament Church in nineteenth-century America they believed in no creed but Christ, no book but the Bible, and no name but Christian.]
132. [According to the Unitarian Universalist Association (www.uua.org), Universalism developed in American in, at least, three geographical locations. By 1781, Elhanan Winchester had organized a Philadelphia congregation of Universal Baptists. At about the same time, in the rural, interior sections of New England, a small number of itinerant preachers, among them Caleb Rich, began preaching salvation for all. John Murray, an English preacher who immigrated in 1770, helped lead the first Universalist church in Gloucester, MA. After officially organizing in 1793, the Universalists spread their faith across the eastern United States and Canada.]
133. [The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), more commonly known as the “Mormon” church, traces its origins to Joseph Smith (1805–44) who claimed to have been called by God to restore the church that Christ had established on the earth, but which had been lost after the deaths of the original apostles.]
134. “Who ever dreamed that a single invitation to penitents to come forward, and a personal conversation with them on their spiritual condition and duties, demanded uncommon inward spiritual force?” Thus the editor of the Luth. Obs. [Lutheran Observer 11, no. 11], Nov. 17, 1843 [p. 3], mystifying the point as usual. His colleague of Pittsburgh, however, comes up boldly to the mark, “A quack may preach a sermon and make a long prayer,” he tells us; “but it takes something more than a quack so to preach the truth that sinners will immediately come forward to the anxious bench.”—Davis’ Plea [Davis, A plea for new measures], p. 32. Right bravely spoken; but the very dialect of Quackdom itself.
Chapter III.
Nature of Quackery.—To rely on forms or measures shows inward weakness.—“New Measures” a substitute for true strength.—Where they are in honor, ample space is found for novices and quacks.
It has been shown that the successful use of the Anxious Bench calls for no spiritual power. It is within the reach of fanaticism and error to be employed in their service, with as much facility as it may be enlisted in the service of truth. It is no argument of strength, as is often imagined, that a preacher is able to use such an agency with effect. I now go to a step farther and pronounce it an argument of spiritual weakness that he should find it either necessary or desirable to call in such help. There is a measure of quackery in the expedient, which always implies the want of strength, so far as it may be relied on at all, as being of material account in carrying on the work of God.135
Quackery consists in pretension to an inward virtue or power, which is not possessed in fact, on the ground of a mere show of the strength which such power or virtue is supposed to include. The self-styled physician who, without any knowledge of the human frame, undertakes to cure diseases by a sovereign panacea in the shape of fluid, powder, or pill, is a quack; and there is no doubt abundance of quackery in the medical profession, under more professional forms, where practice is conducted without any true professional insight and power. Such practice may at times seem eminently successful, and yet it is quackery notwithstanding. The same false show of power may, of course, come into view in every department of life. It makes up in fact a large part of the action and business of the world. Quack lawyers, quack statesmen, quack scholars, quack teachers, quack gentlemen, quacks in a word of every name and shape, meet us plentifully in every direction.136 We need not be surprised, then, to find the evil fully at home also in the sphere of religion. Indeed it might seem to be more at home here than anywhere else. Here especially the heart of man, “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” has shown itself most ingenious in all ages in substituting the shadow for the reality, the form for the substance, the outward for the inward. The religion of the world has always been, for the most part, arrant quackery. Paganism can exist under no other form. The mummery of Rome, as aping powers of a higher order, is the most stupendous system of quackery the world has ever witnessed. But quackery in the Church is not confined of course to Rome. Christianity, in its very nature, must ever act on the corrupt nature of man as a powerful stimulus to the evil. No system embraces such powers, inward, deep and everlasting. These man would fain appropriate and make his own, in an external way, without relinquishing himself, and entering soul and body that sphere of the Spirit in which alone they can be understood and felt. So Simon Magus dreamed of purchasing the gift of God, and clothing himself with it in the way of outward possession. He was a quack; the prototype and prince of evangelical quacks. The second century shows us the whole Christian world brilliantly illuminated with rival systems of quackery under the name of Gnosticism,137 which for a time seemed to darken the sun of truth itself by their false but powerful glare. Afterwards, under a less idealistic garb, the evil fairly enthroned itself in the Church. The Reformation was the resurrection of the Truth once more, in its genuine and original life. Luther was no quack. But Protestantism itself soon had its quacks again in plentiful profusion, and has them all the world over at the present day. Christianity, as of old, serves to call the false spirit continually into action. Some whole sects stand only in the element of quackery. And among all sects it is easy to find the same element to some extent actively at work; sometimes under one form, and sometimes under another; but always exalting the outward at the cost of the inward and promising in the power of the flesh what can never be accomplished except in the power of the spirit.
Wherever forms in religion are taken to be—we will not say the spiritual realities themselves with which the soul is concerned, for the error in that shape would be too gross—but the power and force at least by which these realities are to be apprehended, without regard to their own invisible virtue, there we have quackery in the full sense of the term. Religion must have forms, as well as an inward living force. But these can have no value, no proper reality, except as they spring perpetually from the presence of that living force itself. The inward must be the bearer of the outward. Quackery, however, reverses the case. The outward is made to bear the inward. The shrine, consecrated with the proper ceremonies, must become a shechinah. Forms have a virtue in them to bind and rule the force of things. Such forms may be exhibited in a ritual, or in a creed, or in a scheme of a religious experience mechanically apprehended; but in the end the case is substantially the same. It is quackery in the garb of religion without its inward life and power.138
That old forms are liable to be thus abused, and have been extensively thus abused in fact, is easily admitted. But it is not always recollected that new forms furnish precisely the same opportunity for the same error. It is marvelous indeed how far this seems to be overlooked by the zealous advocates of the system of New Measures in our own day. They propose to rouse the Church from its dead formalism. And to do this effectually, they strike off from the old ways of worship, and bring in new and strange practices that are adapted to excite attention. These naturally
