Untitled article by Wm. C. Gage

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 26, 1865

Popular Errors and Their Fruits. No. 5.

By Wm. C. Gage

As we stated in the commencement of these articles, it would be impracticable to consider under this head, all or even the greater portion of the false doctrines of the day, and even now perhaps we have dwelt sufficiently long upon these subjects. There is, however, another class of popular errors which directly affect the outward acts, and involve a positive disobedience of God's requirements, and which we can hardly excuse ourselves from noticing in this connection.

Prominent among these comes the practice of Sunday-keeping. To say nothing of the benefits and blessings resulting from the practice of keeping the Lord's memorial Sabbath, which are lost to those who keep another day, there is in this practice a downright refusal to obey one of God's commandments. This as one of the evil fruits of Sunday-keeping, is sufficiently frightful to induce us to make war against it, and hold up the true Sabbath before the minds of the people.

This practice also exhibits itself as one of the inconsistencies of professed Christianity, thus supplying fuel for the fires of infidelity now raging all over our land. The manifest delinquency on the part of those who profess to keep the commandments of God and yet fail in this particular, is excused by the plea that "God is not particular," and judging from the conduct of the mass of those who urge this plea, we might conclude that they indulged this spirit to an unlimited extent, and rather decided that God was not very particular about anything.

Closely related to this doctrine, and so closely that it has sometimes been called its "twin sister," we have that of sprinkling for baptism. This error lacks even as good a plea in its defense as that presented for Sunday-keeping, for while the latter has in its favor the fact that rest is secured by it, the former has nothing in common with the true ordinance of baptism. The original design of baptism is to memorialize, and signify the believer's faith in the burial and resurrection of Christ, and this design can be carried out in no other way than by the immersion of the candidate in water. This man-made substitute for the ordinance of God, by thus destroying the divinely-appointed memorial of the resurrection, puts into the mouth of the

Sunday-keeper the plea that "the first day of the week must be kept in honor of the resurrection of Christ." Restore the ordinance of baptism to its place in the church and in the understanding of the people, and one argument is removed from the catalogue of excuses for breaking the fourth commandment, as there will then be no occasion to rob God of obedience to it in order to commemorate that for which he has given us a perfectly fitting memorial.

The evil fruits of popular errors are felt because they are popular, and the higher they stand in public opinion, the more injurious they are. We have now noticed most of the errors in religious belief which are very extensively endorsed and thus rendered popular, and endeavored to show some of the evils resulting from them. There are multitudes of others, however, which do not properly come under this head, the investigation of which might be interesting and profitable, but we will notice only one of them, as approximating to the others in point of popularity, because so generally endorsed by a large body of believers in the second advent faith. We allude to the erroneous views in regard to the sanctuary. By still clinging to the position that the sanctuary is the earth or some part of it, false time movements are made and confusion results, and at the present time the great mass of advent believers who reject the Bible view of the sanctuary, are divided among themselves upon the question of another definite time movement, until it would seem that the declaration of one of their preachers was about to be realized, that "unless something is done for us we shall all go to pieces."

While we as a people do not profess infallibility, yet we know that by steering clear of popular religion we avoid a goodly number of popular errors, and by refusing to take anything for granted because everybody believes it, but on the contrary investigating for ourselves, we may keep clear of the fog banks of error, and sail under the banner of truth until we come to a unity of the faith.

WM. C. GAGE.

Norridgewock, Me.