Our efforts and methods for reaching sinners are strangely inadequate. We have, in common with the sects, the church-house craze. We almost thing there can be no church without a special house. Then the church is being bottled up, walled in, just as the devil wants it. The gospel sounds loud and strong in a room forty by sixty or so. But the world is not getting it. Preaching in the open on corners and streets has lost its dignity since the poor Salvation Army has taken it up, and we must conserve our dignity first of all; working from house to house has also gone out of fashion since the days of Paul. The Mormons seem willing to endure the reproach, and indignity of that sort of work, [105] but of simple Christians very few. We are comfortably settled. The zeal of the Lord's house is not consuming us. We have not much smell of that fire upon our garments. It is Laodicea over again. O, that God may awaken us to truer effort and service, and fill us with his yearning love for souls that counts no cost, that we may carry the good message to all around us in the spirit of Christ!

[TAG 105-106]