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Updated: August 29, 2024
At our prayer-meeting, in the evening, most earnest prayers were offered in his behalf; the brethren prayed that God would restore him his senses and spare him a few days, that he might repent of his back-sliding and be saved. "The surgeons raised the skull, and his senses were restored; his mind seemed clear.
The pleasant illusion hastened his recovery. It tended to restore a complacency, rudely disturbed by an enforced realization of his own back-sliding. He had been quite furious upon discovering that the "little episode" of the moonlit cottage had filched from him all his new won strength and nervous stamina, leaving him sleepless and unstrung, ready to jump at the rattling of a stone.
To society the tragedy of Barbara's back-sliding into art was very real. Dozens of men said very frankly that they missed her like the very devil. "There is nobody else," they said, "quite so straightforward, or quite so good-looking." Hers was a face not less vivid than a light.
This made Paul so caution the Corinthians, that they forgot not the preaching; and the author to the Hebrews, so earnestly calls them, in their back-sliding, back to the remembrance of former days, and to the recollecting of what it was that then had made them so willingly endure their great fight of affliction.
What is the reason for our apparent back-sliding? Is it not plainly the fact that we allow ourselves to be mastered by the animal instinct to strike back? When the child does something that causes annoyance or even damage, do we stop to consider his motive, his "intent," or do we only respond to the result of his action?
Then shall these things, which to thee seem follies, and to the men between thee and me mere wisdom and the bond of stability, seem follies once again; yet, whereas men have so long lived by them, they shall cling to them yet from blindness and from fear; and those that see, and that have thus much conquered fear that they are furthering the real time that cometh and not the dream that faileth, these men shall the blind and the fearful mock and missay, and torment and murder: and great and grievous shall be the strife in those days, and many the failures of the wise, and too oft sore shall be the despair of the valiant; and back-sliding, and doubt, and contest between friends and fellows lacking time in the hubbub to understand each other, shall grieve many hearts and hinder the Host of the Fellowship: yet shall all bring about the end, till thy deeming of folly and ours shall be one, and thy hope and our hope; and then the Day will have come."
Behold, thy Heavenly Father grieveth over thee no less than thy fleshly father, and the holy angels veil their faces for sorrow that thou, who wert once their darling sister, art now become the sister and bride of the devil. Return therefore, and repent! Return then, thou back-sliding soul, unto the Lord thy God! Oh, Mary, Mary, remember, my child, from whence thou art fallen, and repent!"
And in these days of enlightenment, when the doctrine and experience of holiness are so plainly taught, and so generally diffused among the children of God, it is, at least, doubtful whether a soul can continue long in a state of justification, which means that it will either go forward to the experience of entire sanctification, or else it will fall into back-sliding as did some of the Corinthians, or into legality as did the Galatians.
'Shun the man who bids for a farm from which a tenant has been evicted, shun him in the street, in the shop, in the marketplace, even in the place of worship, as if he were a leper of old. This was done with the thoroughness which characterises Irishmen when back-sliding into unimaginable cruelties.
There were frequent definite acts of 'back-sliding' on the part of members, who had in consequence to be 'put away'. No one of these cases might be in itself extremely serious, but when many of them came together they seemed to indicate that the church was in an unhealthy condition.
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