Prophecy Fulfilling by L. A. S.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 13, 1902

Prophecy Fulfilling

By L. A. S.

THE REV. Dr. Josiah Strong, a leading Congregational clergyman and president of the League for Social Service, has published a book entitled, “The Next Great Awakening.” He has reference to a spiritual awakening, which he believes is not far distant in this country. He approaches the subject by referring to the religious awakenings of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, “great movements,” he says, “which lifted nations and civilization to a higher plane.” He then describes the breakdown of the elaborately planned attempts in this country and England to produce another such awakening at the beginning of the twentieth century. The reason why these attempts were failures, he says, is that the leaders failed to perceive that each of these past revivals “came in connection with the preaching of a neglected Scriptural truth which was precisely adapted to the peculiar needs of the times;” and he adds that without such an impulse no like revival is possible again.

But what, according to Dr. Strong, is this “neglected Scriptural truth,” which he so correctly judges to be the necessary foundation of any new religious awakening? Here his perception is sadly at fault. He tells us that it is a “rediscovery of Christ,” or, as he explains, “the social ideal of Jesus,” by means of which the kingdom of God is to be established on earth, in the shape of “an organization in which there is perfect obedience to all the laws of life, physical, intellectual, spiritual, social,”—a “perfected world society,” a “community which embraces every other true community of men, which contains and controls the home, the state, the economic system, the fellowships of science, letters, art.” Following out the “social teachings of Jesus,” he says, we shall “save men rather than souls.” We shall “educate the new social conscience, and afford a radical remedy for social disorders.”

This is the ideal for which Dr. Strong, with his League for Social Service, is striving; and not only this organization, but others of greater note, such, for example, as the Christian Endeavor Society. Even the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union is committed to this purpose by the declaration of its venerated leader, Miss Willard, that the one absorbing aim and “undying enthusiasm” of the organization is “that Christ shall be this world’s king,” by a sort of social and political regeneration. “The kingdom of Christ,” she said, “is to enter the realm of law through the gateway of politics.” These organizations, Christian though they claim to be, are not looking for the setting up of God’s kingdom through the second coming of Christ, in the manner so frequently alluded to in the New Testament; and having rejected the idea that Christ is to come and sweep away all earthly kingdoms, they are left to the belief that earthly kingdoms must in some way be gradually merged into the kingdom of Christ, by the regeneration of society. They would have been saved from this fearful delusion if the churches had received the message that went to the world in 1840–44, proclaiming that the hour of God’s judgment was come.

This idea of an earthly kingdom of Christ—earthly not merely in its location, but in the elements composing it—is fast spreading through the religious world. The energies of those who should be working to evangelize the world are very largely engrossed in the attempted realization of this false ideal, as impossible as it is unscriptural, which substitutes the civic for the individual conscience, and seeks the salvation of society rather than the regeneration of the heart. This sensual, carnal conception of the kingdom of Christ, which would build up that kingdom upon the foundation of earthly governments, will assuredly make use of state legislation as one of its principal agencies, and will enforce its false conceptions of duty in the place of the religion of Christ.

For all this we have been looking, and in this new book by Dr. Strong, we recognize a sign of the times, admonishing us that the fulfillment of the prophetic word is hastening, and that but a brief span of time remains in which to finish the work God would have us accomplish in the earth. L. A. S.