The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-12-21
SPIRITUAL DEFECTS.
CAUSE OF RELIGIOUS LAPSE
 TRACED BY DIR. PHILLIPS.

Congregation - Sermon Outhheo-
 Effect of Yielding to ExternaIs-AntI-
 phony Between Heaven and Earth the
 Need.
 X Despite the indictment weather, 8 typical holiday congregation gathered at the Church of the Redeemer yester- day to listen to the sermon of Rev. Dr. Watson L. Phillips. His topic was srThe Antiphony Between Heaven and Earth" In it's treatment this was strong adjuration to give worldly af- fairs only their commensurate relative position to religious duties.
 pr. Phelps text was: Isaiah 52:1. Awake, awake, put on thy strength, o Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, o Jerusalem, the holly city: for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean."
 He. said in part:
 .This vigorous language indicates the loss or laying aside of something once possessed and used. The call is an eff fort to arouse some one who was once awake and active but who has relaxed his vigilance and is now sleeping, the sleep being the expression of inactivity if not of contentment. To put on strength is a perfectly intelligible figure for to resume strength, to take courage, to make another effort; and the en- treaty put on thy beautiful garments summons the disrobed sleeper to re- sume the discarded insignia of wakeful- ness and power, while the last part of the verse is 9 general promise of ex- elnption from those contaminating in fiuences which may have caused the relapse as a part of the glory which is to reward the aroused people.
 It is suggestive coincidence, some thing more than a skillful rhetorical turn, that this striking form of words is three times used here in close connec- tion. There is first the impressive ad- dress to the Almighty as one who has laid aside His strength, or ceased to exercises it in behalf of His peaple; Awake. awake, put on strength, arm of the Lord; awake, as in the days of old, the generation of ancient times The arm is the instrument by which ones purposes are executed 1t wields the weapons in battle; that simple of Jehovah's purpose and power had seem- ed slumber, seventy weary years had rolled past and God had not come to the rescue. Now He is called upon to rouse from apparent stupor, to inter- fere as in former times and exert His power in their behalf. Then follow the two answering appeals of God to man: Awake, stand up, o Jerusalem and awake, put on thy strength, OZion'
 Here is that solemn, sublime anti phony between earth and heaven which this book declares characteristic of the eternal relation of God to the soul of man. Up from the beleagured soul rises the cry, Arm of che Lord, awake, put on Thy strength!' and back from the infinite willingness comes the answer, Awake, o Jerusalem, put on thy strength, and thy beautiful robes.' And so appeal replies to prayer till earth learns the purpose of heaven and the praying soul responds to the answering call of God. Do you know of any other way of bringing God and man to- gether?
 But the text is an appeal to the mod ern Zion as well as to the ancient What is it's spiritual significance? Awake to the value, the possibility, the reality of spiritual things! It is a call back to a spirituality that has been superseded by worldliness; it is an att tempt to stir ambitions and purposes which have grown feeble in influence that they may reassert themselves as controlling forces in the life.
 There is no spiritual danger more constant, subtle and deadly than that of yielding to the distracting and sopor- fife influences surrounding us, the infiu- ence of things visible and material. The interests of the shop and the fireside, and the manifold relations of life, fill our hands and our hearts and smother spiritual ambition. Soon spiritual hopes and realities become mere tradition, former spiritual experiences are only a haze on the rim of memory, the spir- itual world itself gets to be only vast vague conception of the poets or the emtpy fgment of a dream; then cometh the end of everything that differenti- ates life from existence. Some one skilled in diagnosis ought to give us the symptoms of this slow paralysis; some master in accurate description ought to trace for us the gradual pro- cess by which souls are asphyxiated, and men, once animated by spiritual hopes, fired with spiritual ambition, and tingling with spiritual energy slowly come under the deadening influence of worldliness till at last they fall into base content with the things of Baby lonia, and their lives are bounded by the shop, the dining room and the daily paper. This new Paradise Lost might serve to warn us of our danger if it did not wholly recall us to nobler life.
 70, it is the indelible disgrace of man that he is willing to sit in shameless content so far below the level of possi- bility-individua content that makes men the bond slaves of sordidness and their lives wide waste of spiritual barrenness; communi-content that makes municipalities hug their absurd conceits and prejudices while corrupt rings squander the peoples money, be- tray their sacred trusts, and make pop ular government a byeword-shameles content with something infinitely less than what might be if men would