Ignorance of Teachers by Jos. Clarke

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 15, 1874

Ignorance of Teachers.

By Jos. Clarke

If there is anything peculiarly trying, it is to sit and listen to the mistakes and errors and ignorance of a public teacher, especially if he be a teacher of morals and practical religion. If a school-teacher would attempt to teach his school that three times four are thirteen, the error would be soon discovered, and a continuance of such teaching would consign him to perpetual contempt. Yet we find that while men in general would despise a teacher who would commit errors in teaching the multiplication table, yet they will look calmly on, and see the gravest errors taught in theology, and look upon such errors and such ignorance as harmless, because popular opinion attaches little importance to such matters.

It is this apathy upon religious subjects, and this carelessness as to what we believe, which have ever since the fall of our first parents made our race the willing victims of those systems of error which have held the people in the bonds of idolatry and false Christianity. This weakness has prepared the way for the reign of the papal church, and for the reception of all those erroneous opinions extant everywhere, which have come down to us refined and polished by the papal church, received by that power from the pagan systems, preceding her, and by the papacy baptized and consecrated.

It is very sad indeed to witness the credulity of Adam’s posterity, when false doctrines are skillfully and eloquently offered from the pulpit, especially if some gilded bait is used to entice the unwary listener, or some of the terrors of public opinion or authority are displayed to intimidate and terrify.

It has been by the means of such fears and charms as we have mentioned that error has thrived, not by palming them all at once upon the people, but gradually they have come in. Like weeds in a neglected field, or like thistles and thorns in a deserted

highway, errors and systems of error have taken root and established themselves as loved and sacred treasures; and as heathen nations often worship and cherish the foulest of reptiles as their deities, so do professed Christian bodies esteem and cherish favorite errors as much if not more than the most sacred truths of the word of God.

It was not necessary that any one teacher should be wholly an errorist; if he would teach but one error among a thousand truths, and his successor should only add another, and his converts continue to multiply the error, it would in the fruitful soil of man’s inventive genius come to be what we see before us in these last days.

It is painful to listen to the popular preaching of the day, and hear the doctrines of the gospel, so well explained and urged home, and the next sentence, full of invectives against the present work of God in our land; to hear the eloquent speaker at one moment hold before his audience the very truths of God which we need, and, at the next breath, blasphemously ridicule the work of the Judge, and his servants the angels, and the heavenly sanctuary, so reverently alluded to by the sacred writers. Seeing these signs before us, we do well to consider the cause, and origin, and final issue.

JOS. CLARKE.