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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘Fervent in spirit.’
Rom_12:11
I. Think what enthusiasm has done even in spheres not immediately religious.—The enthusiasm of the student, of the artist, of the discoverer, of the man of science—what else could have inspired their infinite patience, their unlimited self-sacrifice?
II. Again, there is the enthusiasm of the reformer.—Think how low the nations might have sunk if their decadence had not been again and again arrested, and their criminalities again and again rebuked!
III. Again, there is the enthusiasm of the missionary.—In the first centuries the world was full of missionaries. In those days every Christian felt that he was not a Christian if he were not in some form or other God’s missionary. And for centuries the Church produced many a noble missionary: men like Ulfilas, men like Boniface, men like Columba. Then began the ages of neglect and darkness and superstition, and for whole centuries there was only found here and there a man like St. Louis of France, or St. Francis of Assisi, with a mission spirit strong within him. In modern days it is to Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians, to William Carey and the Baptists, that we owe the revival of missionary zeal.
IV. Then, once more, think of the glowing and beautiful enthusiasm of our social philanthropists.—What man has done more for a multitude of souls than John Pounds, the poor Portsmouth cobbler, who, in the simple enthusiasm of ignorant love for the poor ragged children of the streets, became the ultimate founder of Ragged Schools! What a light from heaven was shed upon countless wanderers by the Gloucestershire printer, Robert Raikes, who saw the children wasting their Sundays idly in the streets. Go to the Embankment and see his statue there, and read the inscription: ‘As I asked, “Can nothing be done?” a voice answered, “Try”; I did try, and lo! what God hath wrought.’
—
Dean Farrar.
Illustration‘Like the words “Utopian,” “Quixotic,” “impractical,” “enthusiasm” is one of the mud-banks reared by the world to oppose the swelling tide of moral convictions. The famous saying of Prince Talleyrand, “Surtout, point de zèle”—“Above all, no zeal”—concentrates the expression of the dislike felt by cold, calculating, selfish natures for those who are swept away by the force of mighty and ennobling aspirations. Throughout the eighteenth century—by way of protest first against the sobriety of the Puritans, and afterwards against the waking up of deep religious emotions by Wesley and Whitfield—the sermons of all comfortable, full-fed, wealthy conventionalists were filled with deprecations of enthusiasm. Men did not like the glow of reality, the blaze of deep feeling, the rushing winds of prophecy, harbingers of the dawn bursting over cold, grey lives. What they wished for was the calculating religion of compromise; or an orthodoxy which slumbers because it will not inquire; of a conventionality which never broke their leagues with death or their convenants with hell. They dreaded the throb of a startled conscience, the agony of a revealing light.’