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KNOWN BY THEIR FRUITS

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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 9, 1868

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 31, No. 25.

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KNOWN BY THEIR FRUITS.

By Miles E. Cornell

MODERN Spiritualism has at last thrown off the mask, and it now speaks against the doctrines of the Bible more blasphemously than infidels. Every important truth is boldly denied, and even ridiculed.
In the Spiritualist paper, the Banner of Light (?) for March 7th, 1868, Henry C. Wright gives a list of Bible truths, and then remarks:
“To doubt any or all of these propositions, is to be damned, as the theology of Christendom counts damnation. There is nothing in the mythology of heathen Greece and Rome, nor in the religion of Hindoostan, more utterly absurd and opposed to the facts of human nature, than are all these dogmas; yet we must swallow them all without choking or nausea, or be cast into hell-fire. To doubt any of them is to be damned by the church and priesthood.
To doubt them is, in my view, the first step toward the kingdom of God, which is made up of the facts of nature.
The following are some of the propositions, which are in the above pronounced more absurd than all the darkness and falsities of heathenism:
“THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE as the only infallible rule of faith and practice for the human race, in all ages and nations.
“That God ever commanded children to be stoned to death because their fathers stole a wedge of gold.
“That a child was ever born of woman without a human father.
“That one man can be saved from “the wrath of God and the pains of hell” by the merits of another, i. e. of Christ.
“That our bodies, after we have thrown them aside and they are returned to their original elements, are to be resurrected.”
We are exhorted to “try the spirits,” and a rule is given by which we may know them. “Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not of God.” Jno. iv, 3.
In one of the above propositions they condemn themselves, as the spirit of antichrist.
When they have destroyed the people’s confidence in the Bible, they are then prepared to receive the strong delusions of Spiritualism.
“To the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”
M. E. CORNELL.