Denying the Faith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · BATTLE CREEK, MICH. · Jan 17, 1871

Denying the Faith.

WHEN professed religious teachers talk in the following manner, what may we expect from worldlings and infidels?

The Rev. S. Desprez, Vicar of Alvidiston, Wilts, in England, has recently published a work on the Revelation, in which he boldly denies that there is to be any second coming of the Son of Man on earth. He admits that it is found in the creeds of universal Christendom, but affirms that it is not found in the New Testament. “The theory which supposes that the coming of Christ at the end of the world is an event yet future, is a theory which, although it has the sanction of so-called orthodoxy, is contradicted by the current testimony of the New Testament.”

We naturally expect that a man who speaks in this way of so important an article of faith, and one so deeply cherished by the church universal, will also speak contemptuously of the inspired word, and so it is. “Whilst we willingly accord to the seer of Patmos facility of accommodating power, as well as genius, if not strictly original, yet certainly of the most spiritual kind, we are disposed to attach no greater reliability to the vision of Judgment presented in the apocalypse than to the startling phenomena of the millennium which precedes it.” He regards these visions not “as predictions of actual events, but as the offshoots of a pious yet wayward imagination—the creations of a loving, trustful, yet fevered and heated brain.”

One cannot but be reminded, in reading sentiments like these, of our Lord’s words: “When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” And of St. Peter’s prediction: “There shall come in the last days scoffers” (and these are in the church) “walking after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming?’”—The Churchman.