“The arithmetic of your short-lived days may on Sabbath make the clearest impression upon your understanding—and from his fancied bed of death, may the preacher cause a voice to descend in rebuke and mockery on all the pursuits of earthliness, and as he pictures before you the fleeting generations of men, with the absorbing grave, whither all the joys and interests of the world hasten to their sure and speedy oblivion, may you, touched and solemnized by his argument, feel for a moment as if on the eve of a practical and permanent emancipation from a scene of so much vanity.
But the morrow comes, and the business of the world and the objects of the world and the moving forces of the world come along with it—and the machinery of the heart, in virtue of which it must have something to grasp or something to adhere to, brings it under a kind of moral necessity to be actuated just as before. In utter repulsion toward a state so unkindly as that of being frozen out both of delight and of desire does it feel all the warmth and the urgency of its wonted solicitations—nor in the habit and history of the whole man can we detect so much as one symptom of the new creature—so that the church, instead of being to him a school of obedience, has been a mere sauntering place for the luxury of a passing and theatrical emotion; and the preaching that is mighty to compel the attendance of multitudes, that is mighty to still and to solemnize the hearers into a kind of tragic sensibility, that is mighty in the play of variety and vigor that it can keep up around the imagination, is not might to the pulling down of strongholds.”
—Thomas Chalmers, The Expulsive Power of a New Affection (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), 45-46. Chalmers said this while preaching on 1 John 2:15.
S.W.F. Knecht 