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Updated: August 29, 2024
But, let us remember this, brothers and sisters, that these periods of "back-sliding" become less frequent, and last a shorter time, as we proceed. Bye-and-bye we shall escape them altogether. Some may think that we are laying too much stress upon the negative side of the question, but we feel that what we have said is timely, and much needed by many who read these lessons.
Then to salve conscience the mass of men ride a high moral stalking horse, and write and speak condemnation of every back-sliding, while their own behaviour coincides with the behaviour they are criticising. The hypocrisy of the thing sickens me; no one ever looks any question straight in the face, denuded of its man-made sophistries.
My former back-sliding was forgiven me. And the passage of Tennyson about "one honest doubt" being more than half the creeds, was quoted in my favour. Field-day!... I entered for the two-mile, to be run off in the morning ... for the half-mile, the first thing in the afternoon ... the mile, which was to be the last event, excepting the hammer-throw.
To a woman of her training, her tradition, must not a love that could finally satisfy her nature, its deeps and heights, be a far other love; a love of spirit rather than of flesh? What was all the pain that had warped her for so long but the inevitable retribution for her back-sliding? Old adages came to her, aerial Emersonian faiths.
At family prayer, little Mary, one evening when all was silent, looked anxiously in the face of her back-sliding father, who had ceased to pray in his family, and said to him with quivering lips, "Pa, is God dead?" "No, my child why do you ask that?" "Why, Pa, you never talk to him now as you used to do," she replied. These words haunted the father until he was mercifully reclaimed.
There is the sin of a lukewarm and back-sliding generation! There is the cause why the Lord should look coldly upon His people! Lo! at Shepton and at Frome we have left such churches behind us. At Glastonbury, too, we have spared those wicked walls which were reared by idolatrous hands of old. Woe unto ye, if, after having put your hands to God's plough, ye turn back from the work!
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