Alexander Campbell The Religion of Excitement, and the Excitement of Religion (1839)

FROM

THE

MILLENNIAL HARBINGER,

NEW SERIES.

VOLUME III.-----NUMBER I.

=================================================================
B E T H A N Y, VA. JANUARY, 1839. =================================================================

THE RELIGION OF EXCITEMENT, AND THE
EXCITEMENT OF RELIGION.

      IN the present day we seem to have more of the religion of excitement than we have of the excitement of religion. The ancient and apostolic plan of first enlightening the understanding by declaring and illustrating the testimony of God, seems to be both too rational and slow for the ardent demands of the proselyting spirit of the age. Our Saviour and his Apostles spoke plain good sense to the understandings of men, knowing it to be God's chartered way to the heart. Paul teaching that "faith came by hearing"--that "hearing came by the word of God"--and that as he "preached so the people believed," was only anxious to declare the whole testimony of God, with its innate and cognate evidences of the divine authenticity. His preaching being first understood and then believed, he knew could not possibly fail to seize the heart with omnipotent power, and turn it to God, and Christ, and heaven. Therefore, he never made an effort to excite the feelings of any audience until he had "declared to them the whole counsel of God." He threw no artificial exciting circumstances around them: he never thought of "an anxious seat," nor of "a mourning bench," and [34] never called up convicted and trembling sinners to pray for them. These are all of the greenhouse or hotbed appliances of the present day. Our mushroom Christians sometimes grow to perfection in a night, and wither in a day. They have no root in themselves. They are born in the midst of excitement---they live in the midst of excitement, and soon as it wanes they generally sicken and die. They have no taste for religion that demands both reading and meditation as the food of its devotion, and greatly prefer those feelings which a warm exhorter can produce, to all the moral feelings, and refined and purifying sentiments and sympathies, which the truth believed and read, and pondered in the heart, can awaken within us. They are deluded by the idea that religion is the effect, and not the cause of feeling. Religion, with them, is the fruit of excitement, rather than the root and reason of it. Hence such converts display little or nothing of that constant and powerful excitement to love and to good works, which so visibly and constantly attended the profession of the faith in the New Testament age. The faith of Christ and the consequent hope and joy which simultaneously arise in the heart of a true convert, like the mainspring of a watch, or the primum mobile of any complicated machinery, set our whole frame in motion, and excite to every praiseworthy deed both towards God and man.

      The Christian religion is, indeed, a religion of the purest, noblest, and most refined feelings and excitements of which our fallen nature is susceptible. It exerts a constant power upon all the affections and moral sensibilities of our hearts; but it is itself the offspring not of fancy, but of faith; not of excitement, but of reason; not of visions, dreams, or extraordinary impulses, but of the testimony of God, developed and confirmed by the Holy Spirit. It is, in one word, the effect of the Christian truth believed, and not the cause of faith: for it is faith, and not feeling, that works by love, that purifies the heart, and that overcomes the world.

A. C.            
      Erwinton, December 3d, 1838.

[The Millennial Harbinger, New Series, 3 (January 1839): 34-35.]


ABOUT THE ELECTRONIC EDITION

      Alexander Campbell's "The Religion of Excitement, and the Excitement of Religion" was first published in The Millennial Harbinger, New Series, Vol. 3, No. 1, January 1839. The electronic version of the essay has been produced from the College Press reprint (1976) of The Millennial Harbinger, ed. Alexander Campbell (Bethany, VA: A. Campbell, 1839), pp. 34-35.

      Pagination in the electronic version has been represented by placing the page number in brackets following the last complete word on the printed page. Inconsistencies in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and typography have been retained; however, corrections have been offered for misspellings and other accidental corruptions. Emendations are as follows:

            Printed Text [ Electronic Text
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
 p. 35:     spmpathies, [ sympathies,
 

      Addenda and corrigenda are earnestly solicited.

Ernie Stefanik
Derry, PA

Created 31 March 1999.
Updated 7 July 2003.


Alexander Campbell The Religion of Excitement, and the Excitement of Religion (1839)

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