Shrewd Retorts | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 24, 1866

Shrewd Retorts.

A PREACHER of the gospel, on being introduced to a skeptic, with the explanation that the man was a skeptic, in the midst of an extended circle of friends, said to him, "I suppose, then, you do not believe anything." "O yes," replied the skeptic, "I do believe many things." "Will you then," said the preacher, "be so good as to tell us what you believe?" The skeptic replied, "I do not believe that old story of the Bible about Cain obtaining a wife in the land of Nod, where there was no body living." "Never mind what you don't believe," said the preacher, "no doubt there is much of that; but tell us what you do believe." The skeptic rallied and said, "Well, I will tell you; I don't believe the account given by Moses, that God commanded the Midianites to be destroyed." "I am not inquiring for what you don't believe, but what you do believe. Tell us what you do believe." Recovering himself a little, and clearing up his voice, he made a desperate effort, saying, "I don't believe that old fable of the Bible, that God commanded the Canaanites to be destroyed." His belief was all disbelief. It commences all the time with "I don't believe."

A Romanist once said to a Christian, "You Protestants could not prove your Bible, if it were not for the Holy Catholic Church, and her great men." "True," said the Christian, "for the Bible predicted that there would be just such an apostate church and priesthood, and here you are, just as the Bible said."

After hearing a discourse, in which much was said by the preacher about God, a skeptic said to him, "What is this God about whom you have been saying so much?" The preacher replied, "God is a spirit." The skeptic fiercely followed up, "What is a spirit?" The preacher quickly turned on him, and inquired, "What is a cornstalk?" "Why—why—why, it is a cornstalk." "Yes sir," replied the preacher, "a spirit is a spirit, and if you cannot tell what a cornstalk is, which you have seen thousands of times, and know has an existence, why do you ask me to tell you what the Infinite Spirit is, or doubt his existence?"

A skeptic once said to a preacher, "If the human body, after death, decomposes and returns to its original elements, how is it raised from the dead and identified?" The preacher replied, "And if the child seven years old has not one particle of the matter in it that was in it when it was born, and if there is not one particle of the matter in it when it is fourteen years old that was in it when it was seven, and if all the old matter has been superseded by new once every seven years, till the person is seventy years old, or if all the old matter has been superseded by new matter ten times, as scientific men maintain, and the identity is not lost, why may not the person go through one more change, in death and the resurrection, and not lose his identity? and why may not this last change take place, as it will require no more power or wisdom to accomplish it, than any of the former changes?"