Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Third-day, March 3, 1868

FromReview and Herald, Vol. XXXI, No. 12

CHRISTIANITY AND ITS ASSAILANTS.

During the eighteen hundred years of the existence of the true religion under the phase of Christianity, it has been attacked continuously and upon all sides with the vain hope of finding a vulnerable point in which it could be assailed and its vitality destroyed. The early persecutions under Nero and the Roman Emperors but revealed its wonderful cohesive power and strengthened the love of Jesus' followers for him and each other. All schisms and apostasies have merely refined the gold from the dross, and left true Christianity stronger than before. The attacks of modern times have fared no better. Paine's “Age of Reason” and the works of Voltaire are nearly forgotten, except as literary curiosities. Ever and anon some new attack is heralded with a great clangor of trumpets, as were the “Life of Jesus” by Strauss, and that of Renan, but they all meet the same fate—are read, exert their little influence for evil and are lost in oblivion. Christianity is the stronger for these attacks, which serve only to show wherein its defenders have failed in presenting its wonderful life-giving truths. As a lion rouses himself and shakes off the evening's dew, so Christianity is stronger, purer, and more aggressive to-day than if Paine, Strauss, et id omne genus had never made their vain attempts at its life.