Chapter 11: Bound to Know Your True Character impenitent servant in the kitchen is not spoken to all day, and perhaps not in a month, to save her soul. People will get up a public meeting, and talk about feeling for the heathen, when they are making no direct efforts for sinners around them. This is all a fiction of the imagination. There is no reality in such a religion as that. If they had real love of God, and love of souls, and real piety, the pictures drawn by the imagination about the distant heathen would not create so much more feeling than the reality around them.
It will not do to say, it is because their attention is not turned towards sinners around them. They hear the profane oaths, and see the Sabbath-breaking and other vices, as a naked reality before their eyes, every day. And if these produce no feeling, it is in vain to pretend that they feel as God requires for sinners in heathen lands, or anywhere. Nay, take this very individual, now so full of feeling for the heathen, as he imagines, and place him among the heathen transport him to the Friendly Islands, or elsewhere, away from the fictions of imagination, and in the midst of the cold and naked reality of heathenism, and all his deep feeling is gone. He may write letters home about the abominations of the heathen, and all that, but his feeling about their salvation is gone. You hear people talk so about the heathen, who have never converted a soul at home rely upon it, that is all imagination. If they do not promote revivals at home, where they understand the language and have direct access to their neighbors, much less can they be depended on to promote the real work of religion on heathen ground. The churches ought to understand this, and keep it in mind in selecting men to go on foreign missions. They ought to know that if the naked reality at home does not excite a person to action, the devil would only laugh at a million such missionaries.
The same delusion often manifests itself in regard to revivals. There is an individual who is a great friend to revivals. But mark they are always revivals of former days, or of revivals in the abstract, or distant revivals, or revivals that are yet to come. But as to any present revival, he is always found aloof and doubtful. He can read about revivals in President Edwards' day, or in Scotland, or in Wales, and be greatly excited and delighted. He can pray,
"O Lord, revive thy work; O, Lord, let us have such revivals, let us have a Pentecost season, when thousands shall be converted in a day." But get him into the reality of things, and he never happens to see a revival in which he can take any interest, or feel real complacency.
He is friendly to the fictitious imaginings of his own mind; he can create a state of things that will excite his feelings, but no naked reality ever brings him out to cooperate in actually promoting a revival.
In the days of our Savior, the people said, and no doubt really believed, that they abhorred the doings of those who persecuted the prophets. They said, "If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them of the blood of the prophets." No doubt they wondered that people could be so wicked as to do such things But they had never seen a prophet; they were moved simply by their imagination. And as soon as the Lord Jesus Christ appeared, the greatest of prophets, on whom all the prophecies centered,