p. 53 | IS IT A JOKE? by Uriah Smith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 10, 1876

IS IT A JOKE?

By Uriah Smith

Job asks, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?” and he answers, “Not one.” Yet many, now-a-days, out of the very depths of uncleanness, prate loudly about purity of life and character.

In the Spiritual Scientist of July 27, 1876, appears a report of the Highland Lake [Spiritist] Camp-meeting, in which the writer says that the key-note of the meeting was struck by certain speakers in a “plea for progress in spiritual knowledge, purity of life, and fraternal assistance and sympathy.”

It sounds like the grimmest of all jokes, for spiritists to talk about purity of life. After having broken down every barrier against the foulest pollution of heart and life, torn away every principle of moral restraint, opened the floodgates of lust and uncleanness, and given the rein to man’s most depraved and brutish inclinations,—then, oh, yes! let us have purity of life! It is as if, in the Scripture illustration, the sow that was washed, should say, Come on, fellow-swine, let us be clean! and then plunge again into the reeking filth from which she had been washed.

We suspect, however, that the secret of the matter is this: that having suffered the devil to so pervert their moral natures that they put darkness for light and light for darkness, they take that which the Bible and the common sense of mankind generally regard as depravity and corruption of the foulest sort, and call it the highest type of purity. And in that purity they delight to revel.

U. S.