p. 200 | An Extract by R. F. C.

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 6, 1868

An Extract.

By R. F. C.

“Christ as a formula has been retained in our creeds; he kept his place there all through the dark ages. But Christ as a life, Christ as the truth, Christ as the way, has been little known amongst us. The world is as little able to bear his doctrine to-day, in its actual application to actual evils, as it ever was. We may cry, ‘Repent!’ in general—we may tell men that they are sinners, in general—we may even say, as a dogmatic truth, that they are totally depraved by nature—we may go further and add, that they are not only depraved, but utterly helpless—we may shout it out till the welkin ring, and if people have been educated to expect this style of doctrine, they receive it as a matter of course, without taking the slightest offense, and go about their business the next day, as placid and comfortable as ever. But if we proceed, in the calm and quiet way in which Jesus taught, to define minutely the particular sins of which they ought to repent—to unfold the separate layers of evil in which their souls are enwrapped, to show them the precise defects of their characters, there is an immediate recoil. There is no congregation that will bear to have the whole and the exact truth told of themselves.”—Holy Land, p. 516.

We are not, of course, with indiscrimination, certainly not with vanity, and still less with a kind of spiritual selfishness, to go about and make known our own experiences in such a way as to keep ourselves before ourselves, and before our fellows. There is great danger in all attempts to instruct or comfort one another out of our own experiences, of falling into a self-exhibitory spirit, which is productive of great mischief. R. F. C.