Untitled article by Rainbow

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, October 29, 1867

CHRISTIANITY VS. INFIDELITY.

By Rainbow

A Sketch that Everybody Should Read.

A VIRGINIA banker, who was chairman of a noted infidel club, was once traveling on horseback through Kentucky, having with him bank-bills to the value of twenty-five thousand pounds. When he came to a lonely forest where robberies and murders were said to be frequent, he was soon lost through taking a wrong road. The darkness of night came quickly over him, and how to escape the threatened danger he knew not. In his alarm, he suddenly espied in the distance a dim light, and urging his horse onward, he at length came to a wretched looking cabin. He knocked, and the door was opened by a woman, who said that her husband was out hunting, but would shortly return, and she was sure that he would cheerfully give him shelter for the night. The gentleman tied up his horse and entered the cabin, but with feelings that can be better imagined than described. There he was, with a large sum of money, and perhaps in the house of one of the robbers whose name was a terror in the country.

In a short time the man of the house returned. He had on a deer skin shirt, a bear skin cap, seemed much fatigued, and in no talkative mood. All this boded the infidel no good. He felt for his pistols in his pocket, and placed them so as to be ready for instant use. The man asked the stranger to retire to bed, but he declined, saying that he would sit by the fire all night. The man urged, but the more he urged the more the infidel was alarmed. He felt assured that this was his last night upon earth, but he determined to sell his life as dearly as he could. His infidel principles gave him no comfort. His fears grew into perfect agony. What was to be done?

At length the backwoodsman rose, and reaching to a wooden shelf he took down an old book and said: “Well, stranger, if you won't go to bed, I will; but it is my custom always to read a chapter of Holy Scripture before I go to bed.”

What a change did these words produce! Alarm was at once removed from the skeptic's mind. Though avowing himself an infidel, he had now confidence in the Bible. He felt safe. He felt that the man who kept an old Bible in the house, and read it, and bent his knees in prayer, was no robber or murderer. He listened to the simple prayer of the good man, at once dismissed all his fears, and lay down in that rude cabin and slept as calmly as he did under his father's roof. From that night he ceased to revile the good old Bible. He became a sincere Christian, and often related the story of his eventful journey, to prove the folly of infidelity.—Selected for Review.

EUROPEAN CONVULSIONS.

It is not too much to believe that the state of the world at the present time is disposing many thoughtful men to look a little more closely into the Holy Scriptures. If so, they will find that revelation has a great deal more to do with this world than is generally imagined. It has long been assumed that if we know the way of salvation, and are prepared for Heaven, we have secured the chief, if not really the exclusive, object of revelation. Men have been spoken to as if the great work of life was to learn how to die; they have been addressed as “immortal souls,” and the business of the pulpit is to fit them for a disembodied state and an immensely distant Heaven. The world we live in, that by right of inheritance, by ransom, and by unfailing covenant, belongs to Jesus Christ our Lord, and upon which creative beneficence has lavished wondrous beauty and grandeur, has either been referred to as a thing of no permanent consequence, or ignored entirely as unworthy of mention, when the gospel of salvation was the topic of discourse. *

We beseech men not to deceive themselves any longer with the notion that either art, science, commerce, diplomacy, or the preaching of the gospel, or all united, will bring about a peaceful millennium, either to the world or the church. That day comes not until the Lord Jesus returns from Heaven to earth to rule the world in righteousness. Every prediction bearing on the time of the end, admonishes us that the period of that return is near. We speak without the slightest hesitancy when we say that mighty and marvelous changes are at hand. Assuredly, if Christians saw a thousandth part of the issues involved in the pre-millennial coming of their beloved Lord, they would do all in their power to make that glorious, yet terrible fact known—glorious to his friends, yet terrible to his foes. We are doing our utmost both to herald the dawn and sound the alarm, but we should have a host of willing helpers if the truth on this great subject were generally known. There is no mission in existence at this moment so important as that in which we are engaged. We speak emphatically and advisedly, “THE COMING OF THE LORD DRAWETH NIGH.” Brethren! help us to proclaim that!—Rainbow.