Blindness of Prejudice.
By M. W. Howard
In a leisure moment, I took up a child's Sunday-school book. Opening it at random, I read a few pages where first I opened. By a strange coincidence, I found the portion read to be a gratuitous fling at the doctrine of Adventism, striking back, in a story, to the disappointment of the tenth day of the seventh month. Doubtless the writer, who thus lugged in the incident, thought himself doing a praiseworthy act in erecting this beacon against so fanciful a theory. The book on which he hung his argument, or rather negation, for it was only a negation, was that passage in Nahum, claimed to be prophetic of the chariots of our day—the cars upon our railroads. He made his victim cite the passage, item by item, making his illustration as he cited,99till, in turn, he chose to refute; which he fancied he successfully did, by simply referring to the fact, that Nahum announced it, “The burden of Nineveh, a very ancient city, destroyed thousands of years ago.” Then quoting chap. 3: 2, as a complete extinguisher to his opponent, since he was not (by his—the writer's—showing) quite ready to understand “the noise of a whip, the prancing of horses,” and the “jumping of chariots.” So I thought I would turn to the passage and refresh my own memory, and was led to feel that there had been a jumping at conclusions, as well as of “jumping of chariots.” As I read the concluding verse of the first chapter, I recalled how often and how confidently the words are quoted, “Behold, upon the mountains, the feet of them that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace,” singling out a part of a verse, from an entire book, applying it to the present dispensation, making the bringers of good tidings the preachers of the gospel in our day. And as the author was for standing upon consistency, I felt like planting myself upon the same ground, and holding to immediate connections, since he had shown himself ready to draw inferences from connections separated by several verses, and portioned into other chapters. So I turned to Ps. 2: 8: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession,” which is so often triumphantly quoted in proof of a pet theory—the conversion of the world—but always with profound silence as regards the 9th verse, “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel,” a silence that seems sacrilegious, to one of intelligent understanding of the true Bible teaching upon the subject. Turning, then, to that passage which is so persistently quoted, “A nation shall be born in a day,” I recall how thoroughly I once discomfited a Bible student, who had for very many years been a minister in an orthodox (?) church, by causing him to read the verse, after he had triumphantly misquoted that pet clause: for he could not fail to see that it affirmed just the contrary of what he had cited it to prove. As a dodge, he was quite sure that “that was not the only place where it was spoken of.” It is easy to attach odium to a name, easy to raise a dust and sarcastically pick an exposition to pieces, easy for “A shrug of scorn to do a mischief
That a lifetime can't undo.”
But, till a better explanation appears, I go with my discomfited Adventist, since the passage in Nahum is too graphic a description to be lightly set aside. And if those opposing could disarm themselves of prejudice, they must see that the fanciful expositions predominate on their side,—expositions that developing facts in the outworking of our world's history, are continually putting to fault by exposing their fallacy. And besides, they, more than others, sustain their theory by picked texts, and even by isolated clauses from many of these texts.