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DRIFTING ALONG

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 8, 1881

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 7, No. 46.

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DRIFTING ALONG.

By Editor

THE following question and answer are from the Christian Union:—
"Mr. Beecher, in his sermon on 'The Blessed Dead,' says in an apostrophe, 'Rest until the all-dissolving trumpet shall summon thy dust and thou shalt appear before God clothed in the new, unwasting form of the spiritual body.' Is there any Scripture that teaches clearly this material doctrine of the resurrection? Must we think that at the resurrection a literal 'trumpet' will be heard and literal 'graves' will be opened? I ask the question earnestly, because the literal interpretation repels me so; yet I should not be repelled if it is the true one.
Yours truly, J. C.
"Fayetteville, N. Y."
"Neither Mr. Beecher's expression nor that of the Scripture, which he has borrowed and employed, is necessarily to be taken literally. They are figurative utterances, indicating the fundamental truth that the soul shall yet stand before God, re-clothed in a body immaterial and indestructible; but the method and the nature of the experience no man knows. There is not even any reason to suppose that they were known by the sacred writers themselves."
That is to say that although he used the language, he did not mean what the language expresses, but something as far removed from it as darkness is from light. He knows, however, that it is figurative, and he knows to what the figure refers; but in what manner the fact referred to may be fulfilled he does not know, and because he does not know, "the sacred writers themselves" did not know. For, how could the inspired apostles know what Henry Ward Beecher does not know? We can bear with knowledge when it is positive, but positive ignorance is not so endurable.
The "great men" of the Christian world are fast taking the ground of the Spiritualists on the subject of the resurrection. In fact their methods of Bible interpretation are drifting them into the shoals of Spiritualism, where they will soon be settled down.