The Low Level of Moral Enthusiasm

    By A. W. Tozer

    How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?. . .
    Hebrews 2:3

        In only one field of human interest do we Americans
    seem slow and apathetic: that is the field of personal
    religion.

        Church people habitually approach the matter of their
    personal relation to God in a dull, halfhearted way
    which is altogether out of keeping with their general
    temperament  and wholly inconsistent with  the
    importance of the subject.

        Dante, on his imaginary journey through hell, came
    upon a group of lost souls who sighed and moaned con-
    tinually as they whirled about aimlessly in the dusky air.
    Virgil,  his  guide,  explained  that  these  were  the
    "wretched people," the "nearly soulless," who while
    they lived on earth had not moral energy enough to be
    either good or evil. They had earned neither praise nor
    blame, and with them and sharing in their punishment
    were those angels who would take sides neither with
    God nor Satan.

        The writer pictured the doom of all of the weak and
    irresolute crew to be suspended forever between a hell
    that despised them and a heaven that would not receive
    their defiled presence. Not even their names were to be
    mentioned again in heaven or earth or hell.

        Was Dante saying in his own way what our Lord had
    said long before to the church of Laodicea: "I would thou
    wert  cold  or  hot.  So then  because  thou  art  lukewarm,
    and  neither  cold  nor  hot, I  will  spue  thee  out  of  my
    mouth"?

        The low level of moral enthusiasm among us may have
    a significance far deeper than we are willing to believe!
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    Yours in Christ,
    Paul N. F.