I have known, in my short time, certain churches, in the paroxysms of delirium, meeting houses crowded, aisles filled, preachers stamping and thundering, hearers intoxicated with excitement, and persons converted by wholesale—even children converted by hundreds—they said thousands. Well, and a month or two after, where were the congregations? where were the converts? Echo has answered, “Where, where?” Why, the converts were worse sinners than they were before; or mere professors, puffed up into a superficial religion, from which they soon fell into a hopeless coldness, which has rendered it difficult ever to stir them again.
C. H. Spurgeon (1834-1892)