p. 6 | Power of Truth by Arthur V. Fox

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 29, 1911

Power of Truth

By Arthur V. Fox

ARTHUR V. FOX

THIS age is one of anomalies, of revolutions, of epochs, of apocalyptic trumpet-soundings and seal-openings. It calls for men. That we may respond to this call we must have many characteristics, one of which is a love of truth. The advantages of such a love are incalculable. It promotes science, comfort, usefulness, true glory, salvation. It promotes science by fixing and limiting attention, clarifying the mind, and purifying the heart. Our age is an inquiring one. Truth must eventually prevail. Let a man take a truth against the world, and proceed to conflict, and within a single lifetime he may bring the whole human race over to his side.

Harvey said, The blood circulates; the rest of the world said, It does not; the priesthood cried, Blasphemy; the schools smiled in contempt; conservatism, in veneration of holy antiquity, cried out against modern madness: but ere the great anatomist died, he saw his profession revolutionized. Galileo was twice persecuted by the Inquisition, and was compelled to abjure the Copernican system; but he lived long enough to cry, “It moves!” and yet breathe freely. The lives and achievements of such men as Columbus, Wesley, and many others might also be cited in proof of this statement.

See Luther, a solitary monk, rising against a power that had made kings do homage and the earth tremble. Tetzel, clothed with the thunders of the Vatican, burns Luther’s theses with ignominy, and denounces him as a heretic; but still he stands. A thousand barbed ecclesiastical arrows quiver on the string, directed at him, but he will not yield; he

meets the papal legate at Augsburg, and mildly but firmly maintains his position; lamenting that he is regarded as the leading adversary of the whole church of God on earth, yet speaking with unfaltering accents. Summoned to battle against the combined powers of church and state, in the Diet of Worms, his friends gather around him to dissuade him, urging that they who had burned his writings would burn his body. “I would go, if I knew there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on the houses,” is his grand reply.

It is wonderful what one mortal, with one truth, can achieve in this wicked world; and yet not wonderful, for truth is omnipotent.

“Do you think the Pope fears Germany?” said the legate of St. Peter’s chair to the humble but honest monk at his feet. “Do you think the princes will defend you with arms?—Most certainly they will not; whither, then, will you find refuge?”—“Under the wide heavens,” was the noble reply.

He who goes with the party, and shouts as the people shout, may be compelled, by the death of the president, the vote of a council, or the crossing of a river, to change his note; but he who follows truth, though he stand alone amid earth’s millions, will stand on the side of God.

Truth is not only always present, but always operating. When the drums cease beating, and the flags no longer fly, and the people return to their houses, the popular enthusiasm evaporates, and you know not how to raise an argument or hurrah for error; but truth, in private no less than in public, in shade equally as in sunshine, at midnight as well as at noon, and oft in visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon man, wherever there is a conscience to feel or a mind to think,—truth, like the law of gravitation, with its silent but sweet and irresistible attractions, works out its blessed problems. Stay it? As easily stay Niagara. It may begin as a little spring in the mountainside; it may roll silently along the meadow, concealed by the grass; it may gurgle as a rivulet over its pebbly bed; but its gathering may laugh at chains, as the Hellespont at Xerxes.

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