p. 515 | Religious Notes by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 16, 1882

Religious Notes.

By Editor

-In Indiana there is one Methodist to every sixteen inhabitants.

-Mr. Spurgeon has publicly donned the blue ribbon. We have not yet heard, however, that he has quit smoking. We hope we may.

-At the meeting of the Essex South Association (Congregationalist), at Salem, Mass., Oct 17, Rev. R. B. Howard, in a sermon on James 5:14, 15, expressed and defended the belief that miracles did not cease with the apostles.

-A pastor writes to the Advance that on one occasion he found one of the meetings of the church posted up as a "weakly prayer-meeting." How many prayer-meetings are there in the land, of which such a term would be an exact description?

-Joseph Cook, in a recent lecture delivered in San Francisco, took occasion to express his unqualified hostility to the newly-fledged theory of a second probation. He will no doubt give the advocates of the new theology some hard nuts to crack.

-Mr. Henry C. Vedder, in a pamphlet entitled, "The Decline of Infant Baptism," says: "The practice of infant baptism is declining so rapidly that, unless the decline shall be arrested in some way that cannot now be foreseen, there is need of little prophetic gift to announce its practical extinction at no distant day." The Independent, however, says that "there are as many infants brought for baptism now as twenty years ago."

-While Protestants are making such frantic efforts to have the Pope's day legalized as the American Sabbath, the Catholics themselves are very indifferent over the matter. The Western Watchman (Catholic) says: "We should not make religion distasteful to youth. Young America is Catholic on Sunday, and all of your laws and prosecutions will only make him more partial to the kind and sensible old mother church. Puritanism is religious dyspepsia, and it does not sit well on the healthy stomach of youth. Bring the boys to church in the morning and give them a short lesson in the catechism, and then give them their ball and bat for the rest of the day."

-It is quite common for the popular churches to refer to a converted person as "saved." But it seems that a person can be more than converted. Thus, a report from a "holiness" meeting at Modesto, Cal., says: "Success has attended the meetings, a few having been really converted, and some six or seven testifying that they have been fully saved." Of course a person that is "fully saved" has reached the highest possible condition. There is no better state for him. Some persons are easily satisfied, but as for ourselves, we take great comfort in the thought that "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."

-Jeremiah Chaplin, D. D., of Boston, says, "A theological seminary is established to defend the dogmas of some particular church or party in a church. Of course, each seminary professes to teach the true theology; but the differences of belief and teaching which maintain among the different schools show that all cannot properly put forth this claim. Yet each, with equal earnestness, demands that its students shall accept the particular views propounded by its authorized interpreter of Christianity." That is, the student is first taught what doctrines his particular church holds, and then an attempt is made to interpret the Bible in accordance therewith. We are not disposed to say that the writer is mistaken.

-It is difficult to understand how any one who holds the doctrine of natural immortality can believe Darwinism. But there are many who hold to both. Commenting on the statement that "during those long dumb ages, through infinite hardships, and through the stern regimen of deadly competition and natural selection, man was slowly but surely acquiring that intellectual life which was at last to bloom forth in history," the New York Sun says: "But if these long ages of silence were needed to bring man from the animal to the spiritual, from the mere beast to the philosopher, the saint, or even the skeptic, what becomes of the doctrine of immortality? Tell us at what period of his development the ape-like being from which man sprung first acquired the attribute of immortal life?" A very pertinent question, indeed.

-The theory of a probation after death is really, when carried out to its full extent, nothing but restorationism. It is devised in order to enable the believers in the endless torture of the lost to preach that doctrine with a "clearer conscience." But it will be just as harrowing to the feelings to teach that even after a second probation, some are left to endure the torments of an endless hell, and so a third probation must needs be taught. And should some remain incorrigible after this leniency, a fourth, and a fifth, and so on ad infinitum, until the most hardened sinner is forced to succumb. With such a state of things, eternal torture could be preached with a "clearer conscience," no doubt, for while the preacher dilated on the horrors of the endless hell that awaited the lost, he could assure his hearers that no one would ever be lost. We see nothing to prevent unlimited probation from being preached. It is no more difficult to prove a thousand probations than to prove two.

-It is invariably the case that one false position makes another necessary. A writer in the Independent says of those who are teaching that there is a probation after death: "These men have simply advanced an hypothesis which brings to them personal relief in dealing with the awful theme of retribution, and which enables them, with clearer conscience and deeper conviction, to preach the Biblical doctrine of eternal punishment." By "eternal punishment" the writer means eternal misery. Although men call this a "Biblical doctrine," they cannot force themselves to believe it, and so they invent the unscriptural dogma that those who do not accept salvation here will be permitted to try again. It would seem that there is something wrong either with a doctrine that forces its adherents to such straits, or else with the men themselves. The Bible commends itself to the normal mind; there is nothing but harmony between it and the renewed man; but the doctrine of endless torture is repulsive to every one who has the least moral sensibility.