p. 524 | TOO KNOWING FOR FAITH

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 25, 1880

TOO KNOWING FOR FAITH.

“WE are in that deplorable condition of mind where we have just knowledge enough to doubt the first chapter of Genesis, and not faith sufficient to believe in the sermon on the mount. Before long we shall become so scientific and well-informed, that when a person dies there will be no funeral services. Some one will read comforting passages from the transactions of the American Scientific Association, and the mourners will go about with small hammers in their hands, chipping the rocks and assuaging their anguish by proving the antiquity of creation. Front seats at the scientific lectures will be reserved for the widow and the fatherless, and instead of looking up to Heaven for our consolation, we shall bore down a few feet deeper in the earth for our interesting facts. We have traded off all simple religious faiths for a few meager scientific facts, but there may come that day—when we think of bestowing our patronage on some undertaker—that we shall wish to trade back again, and in something of a hurry.

“We recently saw a man who believed that the whale swallowed Jonah, and we were glad to see him, and to cling to this rare specimen of all faith and no intelligence. He was a much happier looking man than any of the advanced thinkers of the age that we have had the pleasure of seeing. Macaulay says that George Fox, although he possessed an intellect too much disordered for liberty, and not sufficiently disordered for Bedlam, was still able to convert men of ability, like Barclay and Penn, simply because Fox believed what he did believe. In close quarters, the man who really believes anything is more than a match for a man who entertains an intelligent doubt on all subjects. Shut Moody and Sankey in a room with Francis Abbott and John Weiss for a week, and at the end of that time you will find Abbott and Weiss on their knees reading that excellent little tract called, ‘What shall I do to be saved?’ with tears streaming down their cheeks, and all because Moody and Sankey are just ignorant enough to believe something, while Abbott and Weiss are so very knowing that they are not sure that they know anything.

“In spiritual matters we want a man at the helm who has entire confidence in himself, if he really does not know as much as we do. What the world has gained in one direction in the last fifty years, it has lost in another. If we could retain the faith of our forefathers, with our present worldly comforts, how happy we should be. We live in better houses, we walk on better sidewalks, and we drink better water than did our ancestors; but we have not their reverence for sacred things, nor their belief in things eternal. They never saw the railroad, nor the telegraph, nor the last work of Professor Tyndal; but they all believed in the day of Judgment, and they all loved the sound of the church-going bell. They lived in contentment and died in peace, and they were more solicitous to know the final destiny of their own souls than the ‘origin of their species.’ We, their unhappy children, have relinquished the faith that cheers, without attaining to that knowledge that illumines, losing all our piety in our vain efforts to become profound.”—Providence (Rhode Island) Journal.