(adapted from Octavius Winslow's, "Christ's
 Sympathy with Christian  Perseverance")

The world is great cause of apostasy from
a religious profession. It is a deadly snare,
a fatal rock to many a towering professor.
Its seductions are so powerful,
its disguise so successful,
its pleas so plausible,
its eddies so numerous,
its vortex so powerful and absorbing,
few who profess to have come out of and to
have renounced it forever, escape from its entire
enthrallment, and hold on their Christian course
of daily dying to its fascination and power.

Oh, what a snare to the Christian profession is the
ungodly world! And is there not, at the present moment,
cause for alarm at the growing encroachment of the
world upon the professing Church of Christ?

We verily think so.

What means this....
eager pursuit of wealth,
this love of display,
this extravagance of living,
this conformity to the world in a hundred different
ways, so conspicuous and so increasing among
Christian professors?

Wherein, but in an outward profession, do these
avowed disciples of the Crucified differ from the
unregenerate, ungodly, world around them?

If these are true disciples of Christ, where are we to look for the worldlings?

If these are worldlings, where are we to look for the true followers of Christ?

The Church in its worldly conformity, looks so like the world,
and the world in its religious forms, looks so like the Church,
we are at times embarrassed where to look for the one or
for the other. But this amalgamation must not be!