A NOBLE CONFESSION

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 3, 1869

A NOBLE CONFESSION.

The Methodist Quarterly Review, for Jan., 1869, has some remarks on the annihilation of the wicked, which contain, in fact, one of the most noble confessions from our opponents that we have ever seen. They are an honor put upon our views we did not soon expect to see from so high a source. It first gives a quotation from a writer in the Christian Advocate of this city, [New York,] a man of high standing in the M. E. church, which concludes with these words:

“Who would not prefer the dungeon to the cord, the rack to the guillotine? Death is the greatest punishment man or God can inflict. Eternal life in death is preferable to eternal annihilation.” The Methodist Quarterly responds:

“Now did we believe this, that annihilation is more terrible than eternal misery, we should consider the greatest difficulty in Christian theodicy to have attained a solution. The most terrible of all punishments for sin is attained without the slightest pretext for a charge of injustice upon the divine Inflictor. No one can claim a moment of future existence as a right, or its withdrawal as a wrong. God can justly, at his pleasure, drop any being into instant nothingness. And now, if this be the most terrible of dooms, then God can inflict it, or permit it, for sin great or small, and the most captious caviler can utter no complaint. Universalism could not charge this theory with injustice, nor orthodoxy charge it with immoral tendency in lightening the penalty of sin. But for our individual part, we would infinitely prefer the brief ‘guillotine’ to the eternal ‘rack.’”

We call this “a noble confession,” not because the author of it indorses our views, for he does not; but it is an admission, in the first place, that the doctrine of eternal misery is the greatest difficulty in Christian theodicy; and in the second place, if annihilation is as terrible as the writer in the Advocate says, it is a punishment that can be inflicted without the slightest pretext for a charge of injustice upon the divine Inflictor, by any party concerned.

Here, then, is a noble confession. Coming as it does from a mind of long experience, and a Christian minister of high standing in the M. E. church, it is a cheering indication of abatement of the misrepresentations of our views, which we have so long endured from some men in high places in that church and in other “orthodox” churches.—Ex.