Religious Notes by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 31, 1882

Religious Notes.

By Editor

-The Banner and Gleaner adds the following comment to an article from a correspondent: "This brother is not a preacher, but he speaks the truth." This is an unconscious compliment for ministers, but we fear that it is not universally merited.

-The San Jose Mercury says: "A leading Democrat of this city assures us that there are fully three hundred Democrats in the county who will vote the Republican ticket on a Sunday-law platform. We haven't the least doubt of it. With a good ticket on a sound platform, this county is good for six hundred Republican majority."

-The Illinois Staats Zeitung says that "all the signs of the times point to making the drink question a national one, which will also be decisive at the next presidential election." And we think that the signs of the times indicate that the Sunday question is also a national one, and in a presidential election will figure as largely as the drink question.

-The Methodist ministers of York, Pa., have declined to countenance the camp-meetings which abound, because they do not close their gates on Sunday. They say that these popular camp-meetings tend to break down the "Sabbath," by making it a play-day. They say further that the final battle on the Sabbath question is to be fought with the railway corporations.

-The editor of the American Baptist Flag, in answer to a correspondent, decides that it is not wrong to sell religious books on Sunday, and to receive pay for them. He says: "We would not regard it as any more harm to receive pay for a copy of the Bible on Sunday, than to receive pay for preaching Bible doctrine on that day." We were not aware that orthodox ministers were in the habit of settling their pecuniary affairs on Sunday. However, the editor of the Flag is quite right; it is not wrong to sell religious books, or anything else that is good, on Sunday.

-The Sunday Law has been on the statute books for many years, and the Republican party has never worried over its enforcement. Now it is very zealous for it. The Oakland Independent scores the following point: "The Sunday Law seems to be the only question discussed by the Republican journals; they are all opposed to the repeal of the law for the better observance of the Sabbath [Sunday], but strange to say, not one of them advocates its enforcement. How forcibly it reminds one of the warning of the Good Book: 'Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.'"

-The Advance (Congregationalist) evidently thinks that H. W. Beecher's recent article on the "Progress of Religious Thought" entitles him to a place outside the ranks of orthodoxy, and intimates it as follows: "We wage no feud with the pastor of Plymouth Church, and we are not crying up a crusade against him. We do not even advise his brethren and his associates to cast him out. But up in the mining camps out West, when a visitor stays after his welcome has departed, they have a dialectic way of giving him a hint: 'I hope you don't think anybody's aholdin' you, do you? Well, they ain't.'"

-A secular paper has the following: "Chess Thomas, a Texas negro, had murdered four men, and when he was on the scaffold he sang, 'There's a light in the valley for me.' Current belief credits a pretty strong light to the valley where Chess has gone. There would be fewer murders, especially by the impressionable colored man, if the belief were discouraged that a murderer steps off the gallows into the gates of Paradise." Why specify "the impressionable colored man"? It is a fault common to all classes of criminals, and is directly traceable to a radical error in the popular theology of the day. The theology of the churches must be reformed if you would reform the sentiment of the gallows.

-The Seventh-day Baptists have of late years been doing evangelistic work, and are beginning to see its efficiency. Eld. Rogers, who has been the most active in this work, advises as follows, in a recent number of the Sabbath Recorder: "This is now the fifth season in tent work, with a winter in Florida additional, and we are more than ever convinced that our ministers, theological students, and other Christian workers, should be encouraged by our churches and benevolent boards to enter into evangelistic work, and especially gospel-tent work, beyond our denominational lines. Young men should be trained for this kind of labor by some weeks in actual tent service, with experienced tent workers; and better still, to this should be added a Bible-school, with a good corps of teachers; an institute, combining gospel-tent work and Bible-school work, and with direct reference to evangelistic labor and Bible study."

-The advocates of the Sunday institution are developing new points continually. Like the Irish lawyer, if one argument is found to have no foundation, they have plenty more that are "equally conclusive." They have now found that the Sunday Law is an absolute necessity, to complete what the Creator neglected to do. Neither the law nor the gospel, say they, specified any day of rest. The command was simply to rest; the day was left indefinite. To remedy this oversight, which causes confusion, the good people of this State are determined to amend the law of God by a "police regulation." Thus it appears (to them) that they are simply filling a "long felt want." It is within the memory of man, however, that the doctrine was preached that it made no difference what day a man kept if he was only honest. But many of our Sunday friends claim that they alone are honest; all others are "of the baser sort," whose opinion is not worth considering.

-The Christian Union prints a private letter from Addison P. Foster, who refers to the position taken by Dr. Abbott on the destruction of the wicked, and dissents from it, but says: "At the same time, the arguments for conditional immortality are so many and so strong, that, while they do not convince me, I must respect the man whom they convince. And I can do this the more easily because I am more and more satisfied that the view is quite compatible with what we consider an evangelical faith." That is a good admission; but the query arises, Why can he not accept a doctrine which he admits has many strong arguments in its support, and is a gospel doctrine? What more is needed? Or does he think that its opposite has also strong arguments in its favor? If this were so the Bible would be testifying against itself. This cannot be. The Bible; as all Christians will agree, is consistent with itself. Then why does not Mr. Foster accept the doctrine of conditional immortality? Who can tell?

-Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the Christian Union, in answer to a question by a Universalist minister concerning future punishment, after giving arguments to show that the Bible teaches that there are incorrigibly wicked ones who will receive "everlasting punishment," gives his views of that punishment and of the immortality question in the following clear manner: Fire is generally in the Bible an emblem of destruction, not of torment. The chaff, the tares, the fruitless tree, are thrown in to be destroyed. The hell fire of the New Testament is the fire of Gehenna, kept burning outside the walls of Jerusalem to destroy the offal of the city; here was the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched; emblems of destruction, not of torment. Except two, or at most three, passages in the gospels and a few enigmatical symbols in that most enigmatical book, the Revelation of St. John, I find nothing in the New Testament to warrant the terrible opinion that God sustains the life of his creatures throughout eternity, only that they may continue in sin and misery. That immortality is the gift of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, that man is mortal, and must put on immortality, that only that they may put it on who becomes through Christ a partaker of the divine nature, and so an inheritor of him 'who only hath immortality,' that eternal life is life eternal, and everlasting destruction is destruction without remedy or hope of restoration,—this is the most natural, as it is the simplest reading of the New Testament." We have not seen this frank avowal of Dr. Abbott's denounced as heresy by any religious paper, although the teaching of the same doctrine by Seventh-day Adventists is often characterized as "pernicious poison," "false doctrine," "dangerous error," etc.