Enlarging Liberality by R. F. Cottrell

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 7, 1878

Enlarging Liberality.

By R. F. Cottrell

“The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”

If this was true in the days of Shakespeare’s Anthony, there must have been a remarkable revolution in the public mind since; for now our highest officials are unsparingly condemned while they live, but when they are dead they are eulogized. If we can believe it, death takes men straight to heaven; and some whose departure from earth is not to be regretted.

The eulogy of H. W. Beecher on the late pope presents a remarkable instance of the enlarged so-called charity of these days. Speaking of the pope, in Brooklyn, February 11, he said: “With all the complications of instructions, and doctrines, and usages, one would think, standing as we do in the simplicity of Protestant faith, these would have smothered his best nature and turned him out to be merely a hierarch. But his sweetness, simplicity, love, unaffected piety, very generous personal wishes toward all, showed that, notwithstanding all the surrounding influences and circumstances, his love of God and man was so strong in him as to overpower them all, and when he died, in an instant God’s angels bore him gently, as if a little child carried on its mother’s breast, into the presence of the Saviour, and then a crown was put upon his head; not because he was a pope, but because a new heart had been given him just for so loving.”

H. W. Beecher

Is this the verdict of enlightened Protestantism? Is the head of that hierarchy which the Spirit of God, by an apostle, calls “the man of sin” and “the son of perdition,” and which is described in prophecy as a power which would “speak great words against the Most High, and wear out the saints of the Most High,” already crowned in the presence of our Saviour? while those through whom God warned us against this “lawless one” are not to receive their crowns till the day of the Lord Jesus? See 2 Tim. 4: 6-8. And who is this man of such “sweetness, simplicity, love, and unaffected piety,” notwithstanding that his circumstances placed him at the head of a fallen and corrupt church, the Babylon of Revelation, drunken with the blood of saints and martyrs, the worst foes of God and man, the hosts of Satan, for whom is reserved “the cup of the wine of the fierceness” of the wrath of God? What has the man done to clear him from the denunciations of God’s wrath, against that power, and secure him a place among the meek of the earth? Has he said or done anything to clear himself from the responsibility of the blasphemous words which were predicted of that power? Not far from the year 1868, as reported in a French Catholic journal, the pope used the following language: “I alone, despite my unworthiness, am the successor of the apostles, the vicar of Jesus Christ; I alone have the mission to guide and direct the bark of Peter; I am the way, the truth and the life.”

How much short of blasphemy is it for a man thus to assume the titles and just claims of our Lord Jesus Christ? And this too is the man that summoned together the Catholic bishops of the whole world to make a formal declaration of his own infallibility, as well as that of those monsters of iniquity who filled the papal throne during the dark ages of the past! And such blasphemy and unbounded arrogance unrepented of is preached right into heaven, into the presence of him who taught his disciples humility both by precept and example! Surely Protestant charity, falsely so-called, is a very large mantle. The people are becoming very liberal in their views. Is it because they know that unless the way to heaven is broad, they themselves are not in it?