p. 7 | Surprising Negations

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Dec 24, 1908

Surprising Negations

THE denial of religion and of the teaching of the Scriptures by those who profess to be leaders of religious thought is one of the signs of the times. As a recent instance we have the case of Prof. George B. Foster, of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, who is reported as saying:—

More and more people are giving up the idea that their religion is something handed down to them from a divine source. They are coming to see that their religion is just as good and better than if it had been given to them without the work of human agencies. Consequently, religion is on a more rational basis, as people are cultivating it just as they cultivate music, language, science, and morality.

After the same order is the declaration of Dr. Lyman Abbott in a sermon in the Yale College chapel, in which he discussed the relation between science and religion:—

Science takes a rational order for granted. It discovers that order. Religion takes for granted a moral order. Science assumes that from the beginning material things have moved in accordance with a fixed law, and that in no case has there been an overturning of that law. I sympathize with science in this view, for I do not believe that the reasonable material order of the universe ever has been broken by a miracle.

In the olden time the world by wisdom knew not God, and in these last days men are following the suggestions of human wisdom rather than the revelation from heaven, and are consequently being turned away from God and his truth. There is certainly a great demand for the message which shall say, “Fear God, and give glory to him.”