The worst difficulty there is to encounter is the general state of
indifference. There is a general state of don’t-careitiveness. The
Galio feeling abounds. Of all the opponents the preacher of Christ has
to contend with, there is none that we so much dread, as the man who
cares for nothing—who is wholly indifferent—who scarcely has vitality
enough to sit up in his pew, unless he can sleep sitting. There are men
in these times, who by custom, mere habit, indifferently float along
with the current to the place of worship, and sit, lean down, lie down,
or lounge in an audience before a preacher, who seem to say, by every
motion, every cuticle of the face, expression of the countenance and
move of the eye, in thunder tones, to the discerning preacher, _I do
not care what you say—whether your doctrine is true or false_. This
discomfits the preacher. What can be done for a man who does not care?
What can a preacher do for a man whose spirit is so calloused and
numbed as to be incapable of giving attention to a single discourse?
What can be done for men who have so lost the love of the truth, all
interest in it, and so unfeeling to all its appeals, as to sit before
him who pleads its holy claims with earnestness, wholly inattentive? To
such men the whole appears idle tales, a kind of dream or kind of dim
vision. Many in this description, in church and out of it, cannot be
aroused from their stupor, awakened from their slumbers and brought out
from the almost impenetrable spell of thick darkness that envelopes
them, by the efforts of any preacher. The thunders of Sinai would not
do it. The melting strains of gospel love will not do it. Heaven’s
beneficence to man is all nothing to them. Many, in this generation,
will never be awakened from this deep and awful slumber, and the thick
darkness that surrounds them, till the voice of the archangel from
heaven and the trumpet of God shall summon them to the judgment of the
great day.
An effort is demanded, such as we, as a people, have never made; such
as man has rarely made; in any age, an equal to anything in the power
of man to make, to awaken our cotemporaries from this terrible and
fearful state of death. None but men who are in earnest can do anything
in this work. Men who have no concern themselves, or who are nearly
in the same predicament, may deliver their little, dry and lifeless
harangues, but they make no impression. Men must be fully alive, have
the benevolence of God at heart, enter the work with the whole soul,
and labor mightily for the Lord. We must feel the need of a great
effort, to save man, maintain righteousness and restrain the world
from sin, and our efforts must make men feel the necessity of such an
effort. It is not necessary that the imagination should be wrought up,
but merely that the people be made conscious of the reality, to move
those in the reach of reason and argument. But, we defer approaching
any other point, for a month.