The good ole days - do you really want that?
From an old newspaper - back when they cost 1 cent, we read of Christians longing for better things. And of course there was the complaint of a lazy and greedy class known as clergy... Here is the full text below.
Such utterances as the following, made In a sermon preached on July 25, by Florence McCarthy, minister of the Amity Baptist Church, Chicago, show what a vast change is going on all about us in the religious world, however little heeded or understood by the majority of the comunity: "It is agreed on all hands that the Christian Church is approaching some great convulsion. Tendencies In the public mind which cannot be the effect of design or effort, because they are epidemic and are yet unintelligible, indicate some universal upheaving like that of the sixteenth century.
The unexampled interest of the human mind In religious speculation, the contempt with which ecclesiastical tribunals are regarded, the growing impotency of creeds to influence human belief, and the merciless exposure of hypocrisy and licentiousness in the pulpit, which is a part of the current reformation, all point, like the handwriting on the wall of Belshazzar's palace, to a moral earthquake, in which all existing religious institutions are to perish and on the crater and crags of which a new and better religious vegetation is to grow.
I love to anticipate it. I am a natural iconoclast, and reverence nothing simply for its age. I luxuriate in the thought that the sects and the creeds, being in their dotage, are slumbering on the brink of eternal obliteration. For I see in it, not the ruin of Christianity, but restoration and saturated with that impression, I behold without alarm the gathering storm, and feel without dread the premonitory breaking of the ground under my feet. So far from it, I lift my unterrifled face to tbe heavens, and cry ‘Amen. Even so. Lord Jesus, come quickly.’
One of the religious evils of which I bare long been weary, and which I hope and believe will perish in the coming earthquake is the professional Christian ministry.
The men who occupy the pulpit of today are, as a class, unworthy, dishonest, insincere, selfish, corrupt, and useless. They make a trade of religion; they believe only what will pay in money; they are afraid to denounce sin; they live, many of them, in effeminate luxury and elaborate idleness; they are morbid, jealous, bigoted, and cruel; and the sooner they are cut out of the body ecclesiastic, and the sore place burned with moral lunar caustle, the better it will be for their hearers.
These evils press upon my mind constantly and I feel moved to speak to you concerning the kind of ministers of the gospel which this wicked and sorrowing world needs.
Mr. McCarthy, it appears, is a lawyer, and earns hls own livelihood.
Reader, let us not be overcome with the evil of others. Rather, let us overcome evil with good.
Looking to the Son of God for inspiration in all we say and do!