The Church that leaves a dying world to die, a lost race to wander in the dark, feeling after the God whom the Gospel would reveal as not far from every one of us; the Church that turns the very privileges which God gives her into a silken hammock of selfish ease, and the very means of a world’s evangelization into the provision for worldly indulgence; the Church that, with large numbers, great wealth, high social standing and culture, perverts the golden sceptre God gave her for universal conquest, into the weapon of self-enthronement, sitting as a queen and revelling in luxury, making the courts of God her court of empire, and leaving a world in destitution, while she furnishes and garnishes her palaces,—such a Church would do well to read that Epistle to Laodicea which contains perhaps the most terrible rebuke which God has ever administered to His professed people.



 Arthur T. Pierson, The Divine Enterprise of Missions (New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1891), 170–171.