DON'T BEGIN TO DOUBT

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 22, 1881

DON'T BEGIN TO DOUBT.

THE beginning of doubt is the time of danger. The first doubts are the ones to be put down and crushed out. Thus Prof. Heman Lincoln says :—

The history of our age is full of admonitions. Theodore Parker entered on his public ministry with a strong faith in the inspiration of the Bible and in the miraculous birth and character of Jesus Christ. He began to doubt, first, the inspiration of the sacred writers at all times; then their inspiration beyond the best men of other ages; then the infallible inspiration even of Jesus; and finally the miraculous work and character of Christ. The doubts of universal inspiration led the way to general unbelief. Frederick Robertson was traveling rapidly on the same road, held back only by his fervid and reverent love for Christ, when an early death saved him from an utter wreck of faith.

The two great questions of our day are : Have we a divine Bible? and, Have we a divine Saviour? If the Bible be divine only in its origin, and subject to all human limitations in the utterance of revealed truths, it is no adequate authority or guide for men. And if the Saviour were divine only in his mission, and had in his person no essential deity, he is not an adequate Redeemer for a lost race. When Theodore Parker lost faith in his miraculous birth, he said very naturally : "I think a careful study of the Gospels will force us to the conclusion that he was sometimes mistaken. When he was a boy, I suppose he stumbled in learning to walk, miscalled the letters in learning to read, got wrong conclusions in his thoughts. When he reached the age of thirty, he must have made mistakes in his intellectual processes and in his moral and religious processes." Mr. Parker was consistent in his logic. If Jesus were not divine, he was liable, like other men, to mistakes of judgment ; and if the Bible be not divine, it partakes of human infirmities. If God did not guard its authors from communicating untruths in secular matters, the inference is quick and almost inevitable that he did not guard them from misapprehension in religious matters.