Disguised Infidelity

California Conference of Seventh-day Adventists · Oakland, Cal. · Mar 25, 1875

Disguised Infidelity.

As a hypocritical professor of religion is worse than though he made no profession, so infidelity, under a profession of faith in the word of God, is worse in its influence than an open rejection of that word. Avowed infidelity would be feared and avoided by many a mind that would listen to the insidious attacks upon revelation from one who professes to believe it.

To illustrate the idea I will say that I have lately heard, from a professed preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, three lectures, in which he attempted to prove that Adam was not the first man of the human race, but that men had existed upon the earth hundreds of thousands of years before him, and that he was born of parents, as others are at the present day. He ridiculed the idea that "God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul; and that God took a rib from Adam, and of it made a woman, and brought her to the man. He did not believe any such absurdity. But did he not believe the book? Oh! yes; but all this was allegorical; it meant that man was then raised to a higher state of development than he had enjoyed during the previous hundreds of thousands of years of his existence. He thanked God for the book of Genesis; but if there was anything in it that conflicted with the sure light of geological science, it was no revelation to him—he did not believe it. He also thanked God for giving to the world such a man as Charles Darwin, a devout believer in God, who had done so much for the advancement of science among mankind. One would think from the encomium of the speaker that the man, who holds that man was evolved or developed from the monkey, was truly one of the greatest benefactors of mankind.

Most Christian readers will wonder that such infidelity should be held forth by a professed