Brother Brooks in the last number of the Banner (and his authority
as the oldest holiness editor in the country can not be doubted)
says that the aggressiveness has gone out of the holiness movement,
and ceasing to be aggressive it is a dying thing. In most places
its numbers are decreasing, only a few accessions.
Well, he tells the truth. The holiness people as a general thing
through the country are backslidden from God. A large per cent of
them never had anything but a reclaimed backslidden experience
to leave. They got back to God and called it by the new name of
holiness, taught to do so by superficial teachers that wanted to
swell the Banner reports.
* * * * *
The chief cause of this awful declension that has rolled back the
tide of the salvation of the world a decade is that the editors and
evangelists, failing to become more and more aggressive at every
point against sin in the church and out, especially among holiness
people, have backslidden as a class....
Brother Brooks told me he could not put radical truth into the
Banner without Brother Haney and Brother Kent and other such
temporizers writing and denouncing him; so Brother Brooks would
yield and backslide from Holy Ghost power.
Bro. Isaiah Reid told Brother Sherman he did not want anything in
his paper that would indicate that the holiness people were not all
right; he was planning to have the Highway as a support for his old
age. A year ago he called for a thousand "firemen" in the holiness
work as the only thing needed. He has spent his energies this
year in regulating the fiery come-outers from wrecking the train,
and evidently wants the oaks of Bashan slashed down with a little
hatchet, and not with a broadax. Rams' horns, goad sticks, and the
unsectarian "jaw-bone of an ass" Philistine-killer, he evidently
does not take much stock in. Brothers Inskip and Macdonald are not
square on the Freemason question and are churchy. While the shell
remains in part of radical holiness, that only is the real thing,
much of the spirit is gone. You may call it fault-finding, sour
godliness, or whatever you please, these are God's facts about your
case. You know the whole batch of you are afraid to throw red-hot
truth uncompromisingly everywhere. We except from this catalog
Baker and Arnold of the Free Methodist, Warner of the Trumpet,
Johnson of the Stumbling Stone (if he had the Holy Ghost), and the
Sword, and some others.
Now Brother editors and evangelists, suffer the word of exhortation
from a "jaw-bone," break up your fallow ground, do your first
works, burn up Haney's chapter on dress, not resolve against it;
pay your debts, or go and acknowledge them at least; cease to print
such dawdle as Brother Bryant's church holiness writings; seek for
and get the Holy Ghost again; and lead the people up into the land.
--Vanguard.
Satanic forces were arrayed against the reformation work in every
conceivable way, not only by mobs and undisguised, professional evil
(though this form of attack was usually instigated by the sectarian
element), but also by deception--by teachers and editors who were
apparently right on some main question in order to deceive, but wrong
on some other vital points. A writer in the Trumpet points out one of
these destructive agencies.