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REASONING SKEPTIC

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 25, 1881

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 7, No. 32.

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REASONING SKEPTIC.

HERE is an excellent illustration of the obduracy of skepticism, and of the unreasonableness of false philosophy. We find it in an exchange but we do not learn its origin. We have an idea it is from Moody :—
“Here is a picture of a skeptic in the Hebrew camp. A friend who has been healed comes to tell him the good news, and urges him, as he has been bitten and is dying, to look and live. But the intellectual sufferer says :—
“‘ Well, if I understood the philosophy of it, I would look and get well.’ ‘Let your philosophy go, look and live.’ ‘But, Sir, you ask me to do an unreasonable thing. If God said just take the brass and rub it in the bite, there may be some-thing in the brass that would cure the bite. Young man, explain the philosophy of it.’ But the young man calls in another and takes him into the tent and says : ‘Just tell him how the Lord saved you;’ and he tells the same story, and he calls in others, and they all say just the same thing. And so it is with the religion of Jesus Christ. One and another tells the same story; how they are saved —by Jesus of Nazareth; no other name; no other way.
“The young man says it is a very strange thing. ‘If the Lord had told Moses to go and get some herbs and some plants and roots, and boil them and take the medicine, there is something in that. It is so contrary to my nature to do such a thing as to look at a serpent, that I can’t do it.’ ‘You can do it.’ At last his mother comes in and says : ‘My boy, I have got the best news in the world for you. I went out in the camp and saw hundreds very far gone; and they are all perfectly well now.’ The young man says: ‘I would like to get well; it is a very painful thought to die. I want to go into the promised land; but the fact is I don’t understand it. It does not appeal to my reason. I can’t believe that I can get well in a moment. And the young man dies in his own unbelief. Whose fault is it?’”