The end of these things
is death, for the reaction is towards spiritual hardness and a
more confirmed unbelief: when the excitement has died away, those
at least in whom the spiritual faculty is for the time exhausted,
presume that they have tasted and seen, and found that nothing is
there. The whole thing is closely allied to the absurdity of those
who would throw down or who would accept the challenge to test the
reality of answer to prayer by applying the force of a multitudinous
petition to the will of the supposed divinity--I say supposed
divinity, because a being whose will could be thus moved like a
water wheel could not be in any sense divine. If there might be a
religious person so foolish and irreverent as to agree to such a
test--crucial indeed, but in a far other sense than that imagined
--I would put it to him whether the very sense of experiment would
not destroy in his mind all faculty of prayer, placing him in the
position, no more of a son of God, but of one who, tempting the
Lord his God, may read his rebuke where it stands recorded for the
ages.
But where such a movement has originated amongst the people, the
very facts adduced to argue its falsehood from its vulgarity, are to
me so many indications on the other side; for I could ill believe
in a divine influence which did not take the person such as he
was; did not, while giving him power from beyond him, leave his
individuality uninjured, yea intensify it, subjecting the very
means of its purification, the spread of the new leaven, to the
laws of time and growth.
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