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The Plain Meaning Perverted

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 22, 1908

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 85, No. 43.

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The Plain Meaning Perverted

THE recently appointed pastor of the leading Methodist Episcopal Church in the city of Washington in his first sermon made the following statement: —
Eternal life has no reference to the duration of the life, but to the spiritual substance of the life. It signifies a kind of life that takes into itself the divinity and blessedness of the upper skies.
It is by such man-made definitions as this that the plain teaching of the Scriptures is perverted, and a pagan philosophy is substituted for the gospel. If the belief in natural immortality, a doctrine transplanted from heathenism, could be eliminated from so-called Christian creeds, and the simple teaching of the Bible, that immortality is a gift of God through Jesus Christ, could have its rightful place, many difficulties would be solved, and many honest souls delivered from the perplexing problem of trying to harmonize the love of God with the terrible tenet of eternal torture. Life means life, and death means death; and immortality, being the gift of God, is not inherent; and the wages of sin is death, and not eternal life under any conditions whatsoever.