W. B. Riley on Modern Life & Spiritual Death - Glenn

W. B. Riley on Modern Life & Spiritual Death

[Riley (1861-1947) was a prominent leader of Baptist Fundamentalism. I beg the reader to observe that the following was published in 1917. —-editor.]

“And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, and they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.”

Strange how Scripture can express the relation between strenuous living and spiritual dying; between rapid transit and fading truth.

Our locomotion has become the enemy of our meditation.

We shoot from place to place with such rapidity that even reason is upset, and spiritual meditation is made impractical if not impossible. I think I never realized this fact more than recently when in one day I read the reports of the hardship endured fifty years ago by a boy who sought to gain an education, and those being experienced now by the lad mentally ambitious. The first related to A. J. Gordon’s college life, when as a lad it was decided he should go to school, and the place of his education was selected. His son writes—-”In a suit of clothes made by his mother’s hands from cloth spun in the old mill, he started from home. A long walk truly, thirty-four miles, when one is baggage train as well as infantry. Yet doubtless the bag in which he carried his clothes was not heavily loaded—-a change of clothing, a Virgil, and an algebra.” “The country through which he passed was especially beautiful, Cardigan and Ragged mountains, round the base of Kearsarge and by Sunapee Lake into the town where the school was situated, in New London.” What a beautiful and suggestive description! It must have taken at least two days for the trip. What thoughts would surge through the boy’s soul as he climbed the mountain side, descended the valley, and trudged on to the college! What meditations would fill the mind, when at night, in some country home he lay in a deep feather bed, and with all the world shut out, faced God and thought about the future. But those days are over. The lad who goes to college now, if he cross the continent, is whirled along on iron wheels; the hum of human voices is in his ears; he simply spends three days in a moving hotel; and if he go a shorter distance, he drives his father’s car, and forgets the God above, and over-runs the pedestrians below. A recent graduate was asked to tell of the hardships of his early education and he replied, “I lived seven blocks from the Carnegie Library and we had no automobile.” “They shall wander from sea to sea and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.”

This strenuous living militates against Bible study.

If only men would stop a while and sit down and open the Book it would speak to them unless they were too tired to give attention to the tale it was telling. Too often, we fear, that is the case.

—-The Menace of Modernism, by William B. Riley. New York: Christian Alliance Publishing Company, copyright 1917, pp. 140-142.

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