Goodbye To Glory - Ichabod # 6

Goodbye To Glory - Ichabod # 6

Can there be a real Christian home without union with the church? Can there be Christian homes without churchgoing as a habit as well as a duty and a privilege?

Jesus had the habit of churchgoing, for "tis written: "He was in the synagogue as was His custom on the Sabbath day."

When I was a boy it as was natural to go to church on Sunday as it was to work on Monday or to play games on Saturday afternoon, but the present idea is that it is a terrible thing, a species of mental and physical punishment.

Dr. Macartney tells how when Grover Cleveland lay dying at Princeton, his mind reverted not to any of the fierce political battles through which he had passed, nor to the presidential honors and burdens which he had borne, but to the old home in the Presbyterian manse, where his minister father at family worship prayed for the eternal salvation of his children.

The dying man asked that a copy of the hymnbook out of which they used to sing be procured, so that with its music and its memories he might face the eternal world. And then this great preacher says:

"All kinds of doctors are abroad today with all kinds of remedies for our national and social diseases, but a filled family pew in God's house on the Lord's day is the best thing that an ever happen to a family, a city, or a nation."

An Individual May Lose the Glory

It is possible for an individual so to live that it can be said in earth and declared in Heaven: "Thy glory has departed" - as light departs from a lamp in which there is no oil, as fruitfulness departs from a tree wherein is no sap.

The old poet must have had some experience of this truth when he wrote:

I remember, I remember,
But now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from Heaven
Than when I was a boy.

What tragedy when "Ichabod" - "Thy glory hath departed" - is written above and over a once believing heart! What sorrow sufficient to make angels weep - when "thy glory hath departed "is the autobiography of a life once faithful, once loyal, once devoted. What cause for grief when the life once a life of unselfish service becomes a life of stagnant selfishness - a life that centers in self. What tragedy for earth and man and God when the life once possessed of the fruit of the Spirit - "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, meekness, goodness, faith, self-control" - is now a life in which is manifest the works of the flesh - "adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envying, murders, drunkenness, reveling, and such like. 

Yet that you see, that you find, in the lives of some individuals who have gone from us - and in the lives of some who now live in our midst. So many who call themselves Christians have lost the old-time glow. With them the sacred fervor of other years is lacking.

Men and women there are who once believed in prayer and believed that we forfeit peace and bear needless pain because we do not carry everything to God in prayer; but now they are prayerless altogether or are weak in prayer and look upon it as a useless exercise.

People I know who, when they were young, believed the Bible to be the Word of God - infinite in scope, infallible in authority, regenerative in power, personal in application - who now say that it is a book of myths and allegories. Of them "tis tragically true they have hewn themselves cisterns where no water is and have forsaken the fountain of living waters.

I know young people who have attended schools that once, in the days of our forefathers, were bulwarks for the most holy faith. Entering these schools they were believers in the miraculous and the supernatural, but now, deceived by the evil seducers who wooed and won them with strange and fantastic myths, they are adrift - without chart or compass.

From them the glory hath departed, even as it had departed from schools which serve the devil in the livery of Heaven. Instead of believing the certainties of God's Word, they put their trust in the unscriptural surmises of men. Instead of feeding on God's Word, they have grown lean on the diet of guips given them by those who, calling themselves scholarly teachers, plant "probabilities" and "perhapses" and "maybes" or "not-at-alls" in the minds of youth.

Thus has glory departed from the teachers and from the taught. Thus has glory departed from the schools in which there teachers teach. The students so taught and the teachers who, like vandals, break into the house of their faith should realize that man's wisdom is to be laughed at.

~Robert G. Lee~

(continued with # 7)