Pagan Evils in the Church.
James Dodson
[An introductory lecture read at the opening of the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Northwood, Logan county, Ohio, by James R. Willson, D.D., Nov. 5, 1850.]
[from The Covenanter, Devoted to the Principles of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. 6.6 (January 1851) ed. James M. Willson. Philadelphia: William S. Young, 1851. pp. 161-171.]
In all ages the church of Christ has suffered by evils brought into her from the ungodly world. Before the flood “the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair; they took them wives of all that they chose.” Gen. vi. 2, “The sons of God” is a phrase designating church members. The Lord’s people continued to be so called, down to the time of Job, who was contemporary with Peleg; that is, the period of the confusion of tongues. Israel is called “God’s first born.”
“The daughters of men” were the non-professors’ children. They were both the descendants and progenitors of renowned men, who “'filled the earth with violence.” The whole became corrupted with antichristian paganism. The church lost her power to reform the age. She became disabled by yielding to the manners, the learning, and, above all, to the corrupt government of men of renown. She could not even arrest the swelling flood of iniquity. Noah’s family alone escaped the total prostration of all virtue in private, and of all religion.
The fearful catastrophe of the general deluge is a warning to all succeeding ages. But, alas! men do not regard the rebuke. After the flood the descendants of Heber, God’s covenant society, became corrupted by the heathen followers of Nimrod, who built the tower of Babel. The family of Terah, the best in the world, learned to worship household gods. To save the world, God called Abraham to secede from the Noaic church. He gave the posterity of that patriarch the land of Canaan, that, in a nation separate from the heathen world, they might be preserved from pagan pollutions. But, alas! they mingled with their heathen neighbours, “and learned of them their ways.”
When the middle wall of partition was broken down, and the gospel proclaimed to all nations, the church was exposed to temptations; especially from the garnish of the heathen literature of Greece and Rome. The early ages of the New Testament organization were greatly harassed with the corruptions of pagan philosophy. It could not be otherwise. Her ministers were educated in the heathen schools, taught by pagan masters, and acquired their learning from pagan class-books fraught with every abomination.
After the Roman empire became Christian, the same course of heathen culture was continued. The clergy became Arian. A hierarchy grew up in the church, and her government was conformed to the imperial model. It was not strange, for the minds of all the youth in the colleges were imbued with admiration of the grandeur of Cæsar’s throne. They were thus insensibly taught to copy after the example of victorious generals, and to aspire to the pomp of lordly statesmen in the Roman Semite, instead of striving to imitate the holy and humble life of our Lord Jesus Christ. Public morals in the church soon became depraved. The schools were the almost unseen fountains whence these streams of heresy and vice issued.
After the revival of religion, in the sixteenth century, by Zuinglius, and the extension of this work of the Spirit of Christ in Germany by Luther, and in Scotland by Knox, the pagan books kept their hold on the colleges. Their baleful influence was the same as that from Constantine to Augustulus, the last Roman emperor. Alphonso Turretin, a son of the distinguished Francis, became an Arminian, and published a book to refute all the sound scriptural arguments of his father against these heathen Methodist heresies. Soon after, the Socinian heresy arose in Poland, and now prevails over all the protestant churches on the continent of Europe. These are the dire effects of pagan training in the colleges.
We are corrupted to this day by the continuation of this heathen literature of the schools.
1. We read the Bible as pagans, rather than as Christians. (1.) The mind of the reader rests in the words, and rarely attends to the things or thoughts which they express. This is a great error in the teaching of youth to read. It makes the learners what the Romans call aucipes verborum, word-catchers. Hence, in most modern authors there are many words and few thoughts. Dr. Johnson, when asked his opinion of a new book, said: “It is too wordy.” This evil is worse now. In the reformation of the sixteenth century, and down to the martyrdom of James Renwick, pupils were taught to look beyond the symbols, to the thoughts. “There were giants in those days.” Zuinglius, Luther, Calvin, the Turretins, Witsius, Puffendorf, Knox, the Melvilles, Henderson, Sidney, and Renwick, read to know truth. But more than reading for mere thought is necessary to make a truly great divine or statesman. (2.) What is far worse, the word of the Lord is read without reverence, without humility, without faith, without ejaculatory prayer, and without application to the heart of the reader. What youth ever conned over or recited a lesson in Cæsar or Xenophon, in Horace or Anacreon, with reverence, or in the exercise of any saving grace? How could it be done? Is it not plainly and utterly impossible? It would be preposterous for a professor to inculcate the devout reading of even Seneca or Epictetus. Pupils labour for years to create and confirm a habit of prayerless and graceless reading. It requires year of conflict to keep under and subdue this most pernicious and baleful habit. Godly ministers mourn over and painfully strive against this effect of their heathen training in the heathen literature of the schools. (3.) The Bible is read by many without finding or looking for our blessed Saviour in its pages, the design of which is to reveal his mediatorial glory. “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” Of course the pupil in a pagan school never thinks of the Son of God in the whole course of his labours while learning to translate into his vernacular tongue Livy or Tacitus, Virgil or Homer. To this it may be objected that the same argument may be brought, with equal force, against the learning of Playfair’s Euclid or Bowditch’s Navigation. To this it is replied, (1.) That the learning of the abstractions or generalizations of mathematics is mere mental discipline, like teaching a child the A, B, C. (2.) Train the learner in Christian literature, as he or she ought to be, always, before commencing the mathematics, and the faculty of association will suggest to the pious mind Christ dividing to the tribes of Israel their inheritances, and his sailing on the sea of Galilee, &c. (3.) The habit of abstract reasoning and reading to learn fact and doctrine are not analogous. (4.) Could it be shown that the study of the exact sciences is adverse to the devout reading of the holy scriptures, it would be a good reason for their abandonment, but none for using class-books, which, it cannot be denied, have that bad effect.
It may be further urged, on this topic, that many ministers of the sanctuary expound whole chapters, explain psalms, and preach sermons without any, or with very slight allusion to the Saviour of sinners. To heathen training must, be referred the painful fact that in baccalaureate exhortations of principals of colleges to their graduating classes—in addresses of orators, delivered before literary societies, before so-called Christian female seminaries, and on the anniversaries of scientific associations—there is nothing of the gospel of Christ, revealed in his Bible. They savour more, far more, of heathen Greece and Rome, than of the Lord’s holy word. To the same source we must trace the deplorable fact, that many protestant teachers, who call themselves ministers of Christ, as many of the Anabaptists, affirm that the Lord Jesus is rarely, if at all, to be found in the Old Testament. Even Dr. Watts, who professes to, be very devotional, says, in the preface to his first edition of his imitation of David’s Psalms, “I have endeavoured to make David speak like a Christian.” He had read the Bible like a pagan. Had he read the Psalms as an humble Christian, he would have “found the Messiah,” as the devout Bishop Horne does, in every one of the inspired “Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs.”
2. Another pagan evil in the church is the inordinate indulgence in sensual gratifications. The apostle James, writing by the Spirit of Christ, calls them “the lusts of the flesh.” “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?” Jas. iv. 1—4. These lusts are innate in the heart of depraved man, who is “conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity.” “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Ps. li. 5. This confession of original sin was indited by the Spirit of Christ, to be sung by all adult saints of every age and nation, from David to the last day. The spirits of just men made perfect, everyone, sing, for substance in heaven this song to all eternity. “And they sang a new song, saying. Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seven seals thereof, for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God.” Rev. v. 9. By his obedience and death Christ redeemed them from that condemnation and corruption in which they were “conceived” and born.
This native, total, and universal depravity works, of itself, “all manner of concupiscence.” And, nurtured by such songs as those of Homer—Anacreon, it “setteth on fire the course of nature, and it is set on fire of hell.” Jas. iii. 6. It does all this, (1.) By tippling, intoxication, and drunkenness. Virgil makes the god Silenus a drunkard. Horace celebrates the glory of Bacchus and the inspiration of song when the poet “Læsetatur turbide” is confusedly joyful. Every tippler is a troubler of the peace of the church. The numerous liquor stores, by which there is yet one, perhaps two, in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, are fountains of corruption fraught with damnation. This enormous evil can never be eradicated while the heathen lyric poets, who worship at the shrine of Bacchus, are the class-books of pupils that, when grown men, govern the nations. This lust of the flesh is an inveterate and deadly evil. After twenty-five years of mighty and praise worthy effort, its streams do yet issue from every pagan fountain. (2.) Gluttony. Homer asserts that Jupiter, his supreme god, neglected important business that he might attend a barbecue among the gluttonous Ethiopians, on the head waters of the Nile. Now, if the great god or the prince of poets, as he is called, neglected the affairs of his empire for a luxurious revel, why may not Kentucky have her political barbecues, the gay youth their picnic revels, and the clergy synodical soirees? (3.) The lust of harlotry. Virgil and Anacreon were avowed, unblushing Sodomites.
“Pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin delicias.” [The Shepherd Corydon burned for fair Alexis.]—Ecloga ii. 1.
Corydon is Virgil; Alexis a boy, whom Mecænas, to buy his muse for Augustus, had given to him for his catamite [i.e., a pubescent boy kept for sodomitical purposes]. Bathyllus [a Roman actor noted for his erotic dancing dressed as a woman] was a voir scorta [known prostitute] of Anacreon. Jupiter, in all the poets, is a notorious adulterer. Juno, his wife, finds him guilty of amorous adventures, as Louis Napoleon calls his whoredom, and reproaches him bitterly; but still she lives with him as her husband; as at least one wife of a distinguished statesman does, south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and so one north of that demarcation. Homer’s Iliad, it need not be said, read in all the colleges, begins—
“Μῆνιν ἄειδε.” &c.
“The wrath of the Pelian Achilles I sing.”
Why was he wroth? Agamemnon, the commander-in-chief, took from him, as he alleges, unjustly, Briseis, the daughter of Chryseis, the priest of little Troy, who had fallen to him by lot, as his harlot, after the sacking of the city. He drew off his army for ten years, in wrath.
For what was the expedition against Troy fitted out in Greece? For no other end, if we believe Homer, than to bring back by force Helen, the wife of King Menelaus. This Helen had run away with Paris, a son of Priam, king of Troy, and, of course, had become his harlot. The “pious” Æneas, the hero of the Ænead, seduced Dido, the widowed queen of Carthage, after she had refitted his weather-beaten fleet; and afterward he basely abandoned her. Virgil knew all this to be base; for while Æneas and she were in the cave, he says—
“Nymphæ verticibus raontis ululerant.”
“The nymphs screamed from the top of the mountain.”
All this is mere fiction. There were one hundred and fifty years between the departure of Dido from Tyre and that of Æneas from Troy. But, no matter; the demoralizing effect on youth is the same.
One’s heart sickens at the recital of these most loathsome abominations, committed even by the heathen. But what shall we say when all these misdeeds, are garnished with great beauties of style, and put into the hands of our sons, who have no need of such incentives to lust?
To this argument it is in vain to object that Samson, David, Solomon, and Peter committed great sins, which are recorded in the Bible. 1. Because they are narrated so as to awaken the hatred of every pious mind against the sins which they committed. The Spirit teaches the Bible reader to loathe Delilah’s treachery, and be humbled in view of Samson’s gross sin. The whole truthful story is a warning to beware of the harlot’s seductive wiles. The same is true of David’s, Solomon’s, and Peter’s falls. Not so of the seduction of Dido by Æneas. Besides, it was the pious Æneas, as Virgil calls him, that abandoned, after he had seduced the queen of Carthage; but it was the heathen Delilah that ensnared and betrayed Samson. 2. God sorely chastised Samson, David, Solomon, and Peter; but no evil befell Æneas, to punish his lust and most base treachery. None at all. He went on in his marauding expedition against Italy; conquered King Evander; murdered, in lawless warfare, Turnus, the defender of his country; married Lavinia, to whom that young prince had been espoused, and subdued Italy. “If ye be without chastisement whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.” Heb. vi. 7. Virgil passes vice on to glory without suffering; not so Bible historians. 3. The repentance of the saints is recorded. Samson groaned in the prison-house till his hair grew. Solomon’s is attested by the book of Ecclesiastes. David’s in Psalm li.; and Peter “wept bitterly.” What of Virgil’s and Anacreon’s sodomy, and Æneas’s base ingratitude, treachery, and ruin of his hospitable benefactress? Did they ever repent? Not at all. As many now do, they gloried in their shame. Are these fit examples for our sons? Will reading their books rebuke lust?
As long as causes produce effects, the mental training of youth in these filthy class-books must defile the church of Christ with “fleshly lusts.” Unlawful and ensnaring dalliances, fornication, adultery, sodomy, and treachery, like that of Æneas, will pollute the house of God. Not only the convents and nunneries of Papists, where “the outer court is trodden under foot of the pagans,” but protestant congregations will have reason to mourn over the filthy talk and more filthy doings of their, children.
Those who are more discreet, and have a conscience towards God, talk so lightly, utter double entendres, engage the affections of young associates by seducing arts, for the purpose of transient gratification, and cruelly abandon those whom they catch in their toils, that the hearts of God’s people are grieved. Several young preachers are guilty of these, and even worse practices. Allow me, my dear pupils, to warn you against every approximation to these detestable vices. Pray God to pardon and reform every evil habit which you may have begun to form, in your course of literary training in the pagan schools of the age. Watch against them in your waking and sleeping imaginations and emotions. They are loathed of God, and detested by all virtuous people.
However true it is that some church members, baptized youth who never saw either Virgil or Anacreon, are guilty of these impurities, it in no wise weakens the argument against these sources of pollution. They nearly all read the vile novels and sing libertine songs that come forth from fountains so corrupt. Good people do not attend the libidinous theatres of the day, but many of them learn the fashionable, secular songs of female seminaries, many of them replete with the well disguised poison. It is, alas! diffusing its virus through every vein and artery of social life.
3. Fondness for vain show. The Holy Spirit calls evils of this class “the lusts of the eye.” There is reason to fear that the mass of protestants—we are sure it is so with papists—are far more desirous of garnishing the “outer man” than “the hidden man of the heart.” Dress, rich household furniture and equipage must be bought, often on credit, even if the poor are naked and hungry, vacant congregations lack pastors to feed them with the bread of life, pastors starve, and the heathen perish. “These things ought not so to be.” “The body is more than raiment,” and ought to be washed with pure water from the fountain of life. The soul is more than the body, and should be garnished with grace.
The noblest of all the external senses is the eye. Its abuse is the most dangerous, as the misuse of a mental faculty is worse than that of a bodily organ. That the polished heathen did and do sinfully indulge the lusts of the eye is manifest “on all these.” The Grecian statues of Jove and of Hercules, with hosts of other false gods, and the Jupiter Stator in pagan Rome, Venus de Medicis of papal Rome, and the blasphemous attempts to paint the three persons of the adorable Trinity, abundantly demonstrate their impious indulgence of the lusts of the eye. Homer describes Queen Helen, of adulterous memory, as decorated in tasteful and gorgeous robes. Virgil adorns Diana, a heathen goddess, in a dress of finished elegance. The fondness for vain show in the whole protestant world, and, to some extent, in God’s covenant society, is, like the lusts of the eye, of pagan ancestry.
The elegant needle-work of the curtains that garnished the tent of witness—the incomparable artistic beauty in the thyne wood, the brass, the gold, and the jewelry of that sacred type of the Mediator’s glory—was adapted to the condition of the church when she “was under tutors and governors, until the time appointed of the Father” for abolishing these “weak and beggarly elements.” They had indeed a glory, but their glory is no glory, by reason of that which has followed. Besides, there were but two statues—the cherubim of glory. These were not images of any living man or animal, as those of Hercules or of Peter pretend to be. They were not, as the pictures and sphinxes of the Egyptian standard, or “those calves which people have forth sent,” pictures of Apis, the living bull, which that very learned but debased people adored. They were merely types, like the lamb of the passover. The sun has risen, the stars have disappeared in the New Testament gospel firmament.
Again, they were seen but once a year, and that by the high priest alone, and when they were obscured by the cloud of incense which went up from the golden censor. They were mere emblems of the ministry of Christ by church officers. As to the embossments of the curtains, they were cherubims and palm trees. But they were covered by outside curtains, nearly down to the ground. Its sheets outside were without any other ornaments, except the porcupine (“badger”) skins of which they were composed. Hence, they were seen only while the tabernacle was being set up and taken down by the priests, and seen by them alone. The palm trees were appropriate types of our Lord’s “growth in favour both with God and man.”
The temple was as “holy and revered” as the tabernacle, “The priests’ lips kept knowledge” in the exposition of these blessed gospel mysteries, unfolding the glory of “Immanuel, God with us.” They were not exhibited to the multitude of worshippers, as papists do their images and pictures, to awaken the sensual emotions of vision. There was no danger that the “lusts of the eye” would be cherished. As a matter of fact, they were not. While all pagan nations, from Nineveh to Rome, employed sculpture and painting in the service of their gods, the Israelites never attempted, to imitate the cherubims and palm trees. No man, under pain of death, might make “a perfume” like that holy confection ordained of Christ. Ex. xxx. 34—38. So they might not imitate the cherubims and palm trees, to gratify “the lusts of the eye.”
When they used images and painting in their idolatrous defections, the calves of Egypt were their models at Dan and Bethel, and their paintings were “four-footed beasts and creeping things” in their “chambers of imagery,” “after the manner of Egypt.”
There is no evidence that, in their cities, farm-houses, or synagogues they copied the architectural symmetry and richness of the temple. But quite the reverse. It is plain that the whole of the Hebrew ritual was adverse to “the lusts of the eye.” At present it is the tendency and the mournful fact, they are employed in devotional service, and in every other affair, for the mere gratification of the sense of seeing. It is the prevailing passion. Watts’s imitation [of the Psalms], and the songs of other hymnologists and poetasters, are so framed as to recall, by the faculty of conception, the visual emotions, and thus cater for “the lusts of the eye,” as papists do by statuary and painting. Alas!
The erection of sumptuous edifices for public worship, such as Trinity Church, in the city of New York, and St. Paul’s in London—their costly ornaments, their magnificent organs, and “the surplice and robe” of the bishop—cater to pagan “lusts of the eye.” To the same cause must be referred the coarse woodcut pictures of Christ, saints, and brute animals; and the elegant engravings of the Illuminated Bible: all are pagan devices for ministering to the gratification of “the lusts of the eye,” and not to the culture of faith in Christ as seen by the eye of the believer’s sanctified mind. Now, all these receive no countenance from the beauties of the tent of witness and the glories of the temple of the Lord.
4. There is an unholy ambition, truly pagan, in the church of Christ, This the holy word calls “the pride of life.” Pride is that unholy emotion which consists in self-exaltation. It generates the still baser passion which we denominate vanity—the courting of popular favour by the deceitful arts of cunning and vile demagogues. The pagan historians, philosophers, moralists, and poets designedly cultivate both pride and vanity.
“Exegi monuraentura perennius ære.”
“I have built a monument more durable than brass.”
So affirms Horace of his most basely licentious songs. How this Epicurean boaster swells in pride! He goes farther, and glories in his shame:—
“E grege Epicuri porcus.”
“I am a hog from the sty of Epicurus.”
Very true. Were his most licentious lyrics translated, all of them, into English, there is not a mother in the state of Ohio who would suffer the book to lie on the parlour table. Take, for example, his Ode “in annulam”—“Song to an old woman.” Of such loathsome effusions this “prince of Latin lyric poets,” as he is fondly called by the panders of heathen literature, is proud. How is it possible that our sons, in their tender years, under clerical (?) teachers, can employ a whole year in learning to appreciate such poetry, without having their minds puffed up with pride? Herodotus and Xenophen ascribe the military achievements of Cyrus to his own native genius and prowess. It is true they make him pray to the gods of Persia and Media. What modern general or statesman prays to any god? This, by the way. But the success of his armies is not of God, in their pages, but of Cyrus. We learn, in the schools, to glorify the heroes of the three wars, and not to glorify God. Even the minister of Christ, at the very altar, dares to do this. Is it any wonder that the young men of the church take for their model, not Christ, but Washington and Napoleon? They cannot be Cæsars or Wellingtons in the state, and they seek to gratify their pride by aiming to reach the exalted fame of heathen or heathenised warriors by church preferment. Fame! Fame! Fame! how many and great are thy idolatrous worshippers in the enchanted seats of thy temple!
Man, totally depraved by nature, condemned for Adam’s first sin (Rom. v. 18,) is of himself inclined to ambition, as to every other sin; but the pride of our hearts is nurtured and fortified by our training in most primary schools, and in all the literary institutions but one.
A heathen moralist affirms that “a virtuous man is better than the gods; for they cannot sin, whereas the good man’s virtue proceeds from his own acts of the will.” This is the very essence of Hopkinsianism and Methodism—a pretended innate power to make ourselves good. This error pervades almost the whole of the congregational masses of the East and of the New School, or, as they call their body of suspended ministers and elders, the Constitutional General Assembly. Seneca teaches that the gods cannot sin. Of course adultery and bestiality are, by the pagan standard of morals, sinless; for Jupiter commits the former in the seduction of Latona’s mother, the latter in the metamorphosis of Europa into a heifer; Venus is a harlot, for the pious! Æneas was her son by Anchises, who was not her husband: Juno, the wife of Jove, is a vixen, like Xantippe, the scolding wife of Socrates.
Now, if any young man who knows fornication to be a sin, abstains from its commission, he will very naturally be proud of his virtue; for he is better than the thundering Jupiter and the beautiful Venus, with whom, in the heathen school-books, he is in fellowship for years. “Can a man take fire into his bosom, and not be burned?”
The remedy for this, the word of God, is not applied in the academical nurseries of youth. That word alone, applied by the Spirit of Christ, can humble the innate pride of corrupt man.
Vanity, the child of pride, is a wide spread evil in the church. It is a loathsome, fretting sin, called demagogueism, in the state. In the pulpit, where the ministry should inculcate humility as a lovely grace of the Spirit, it cannot be expected that they will not by example teach vanity, while their training for the holy function is chiefly pagan, except in the household nursery.
Virgil and Horace, favourite academical class-books, teach by example, the most efficient instructor, to seek the favour of the ungodly great.
Of Augustus Cæsar, Virgil, in bis first eclogue, says:—“Namque erit ille mihi deus,”—“He will be my god.”
Of his prime minister Horace thus speaks, in the first line of his first ode:—
“Mæcenas, atavis edite regibus.”
“O Mæcenas, descended from a race of kings.”
These are specimens of their fulsome adulation of the seventh head of “the fourth beast out of the bottomless pit.” What was their object in thus prostituting their pens ? After the battle of Pharsalia, Augustus drove from their homes the farmers about Mantua, and parceled them out as rewards to his soldiers, who had been employed to crush the Roman Republic, when in the last agonies of death. But he spared the farms of Virgil’s and Horace’s families, that these base poetasters might write songs conciliating the people to imperial despotism.
Homer composed his Iliad to flatter the family of Achilles, and justify his protracting the siege of Troy for ten years, by withdrawing his division of the invading army. The whole poem is calculated to create and nurture the factious spirit of the fiercest demagogues, and to foster the thirst for lawless warfare and the most wanton and cruel rapine. That splendid and impious poem was the bible of Alexander the Great, and of Julius Cæsar.
We cease to wonder that the whole body of popish priests, and the great majority of the protestant clergy, all meanly pander to despots of every name, when our sons are trained for many years in schoolbooks so anti-christian and anti-republican. An unholy desire to enjoy the favour of men, whether on an imperial throne or in the drunken legislative hall of a republic, is made the ruling emotion of our pupils’ minds. This is a “vanity of vanities,” and it is a sore evil.
This vanity operates on men in almost all the social intercourse of even God's covenant people. The emotions expressed by the countenance and by the tongue are not those of the heart. The good will, and even homage of brethren, are sought by deceitful smiles and “words of flattery,” Virgil and Horace must have hated both Augustus and Mæcenas, How often do men, even ministers of religion, smile, yes, fawn, on brethren whom they do all they dare to harm.
“From lying lips and guileful tongue,
Oh Lord, my soul set free.”
We live in an age when “every brother will utterly supplant,” like that of the prophet Ezekiel. Then God would no longer bear with the accumulated pagan abominations that defiled the holy city and sanctuary. The priests and the prophets rolled the pride of life “under their tongues, like a sweet morsel,” for the purpose of gaining the favour of the heathen around them. The worst feature of this evil is, the favour of the world is more dear to their hearts than that of brethren in Christ; yes, than even that of God himself.
We have another phase of this alarming evil in the appeals which are made to the world for its favour by the reality or by the show of wealth. The pursuit of riches is not mainly to gratify our own lust of the eye, the ear, or the palate; it is to gain the applause of the world. It is homage to “the pride of life,” to unholy ambition.
“And when thou to thyself dost well,
Men will thee praises give.”
For that praise we labour in all departments of business.
One other class of these pride-of-life evils is of extensive and most baleful influence—the courting of a corrupt literary taste by continuing, to destroy youth with these bad books, after they are known to be only evil. They are in all the popish learned foundations in the world. The Jesuits have the entire direction of most popish schools. They probably do not know it is sin, and they certainly do not care whether it is or not. Their only inquiry is, Will it promote the wealth and power of their order? This evil, however, is not in the church. Our Synod, and the Old School General Assembly, in 1845, declared the papists to be no part of Christ’s visible church. But there are numerous and monstrous popish, that is, pagan evils in the protestant churches. While the outer court is trodden under foot of the pagans, the inner court, alas! is defiled with many of their abominations. And there is none more alarming and ruinous than this. It poisons the fountains of learning. Like whoredom, it plants death in the sources of life.
All the prelatical institutions, including the Methodistic colleges and academies—all those of the Congregationalists, including the ten Baptist sects, and all the subdivisions of the Presbyterian church, except Geneva Hall—are purely pagan in the department of ancient lore, except a little of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament.
The Methodists have organized a school in this state within a few years. They call it “The Wesleyan University.” It is altogether sectarian. Its board of trustees consists of twenty-two members, among whom there are but three reverends. So they commit the education of their children to laymen, and not to “officers of the church,” as our covenant ancestors did.[1] The board of visitors is composed of five reverends; the committee of examination of five ditto; the agents are four ditto, and the convocation, as they call it, numbers nineteen members.[2]
The schedule of studies in their preparatory school is all heathen. They even retain the filthy Ovid,[3] which has been long banished from Presbyterian institutions. They do not blush to put Anacreon into their programme for the freshman year.
The first three years in the college course is sheer heathenism. The Bible is opened the third and last term of the last year, when the boys are so deeply imbued with heathenism that there is no danger the Bible will spoil them. It is true they have what they call the scientific and Bible course, which is somewhat obscure in its relation to the college course. But one thing is plain, they pay court to the friends of the Lord’s good word so far as that they would insinuate that the O. W. University is willing to let boys study it some, if they please.
This is a great change in Methodist tactics. They relied, until a few years ago, on religious emotion to swell the number of proselytes; now they have resolved to try the emotions that are stirred by the lustful Ovid and Anacreon. But why, when they no longer rave against a learned ministry, and cease to extol illiteracy in the pulpit, have they not adopted a Christian course of literary culture? It is “the pride of life.” It is a desire to imitate the worst feature in Presbyterian education—academical heathenism. They probably think, as a D. D, principal of a college said, some years ago, “If we make the scriptures of the Old and New Testament an essential part of our course in Jefferson College, we shall have no scholars.” We must have a large catalogue and income, whether the pupils are saved or damned.
The whole head is sick, the whole heart faint. All is wounds, bruises, and putrefying sores, that have not been closed, nor bound up, nor mollified with ointment. Oh that our blessed redeeming Head, who sits as a refiner and purifier, may soon purely purge away the dross and take away the tin. Amen.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Second Book of Discipline.
[2] If fifty-five officers cannot govern this pagan school, the boys must be very unruly. The Methodists know well, as some others, how to buy favour by offices.
[3] Catalogue, 1850, p, 16.