SKEPTICISM CONQUERED

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 3, 1867

SKEPTICISM CONQUERED.

A RECENT writer in the following sentences exhibits where lies that force of Christianity which lives through long centuries:

“I was a skeptic, but this scene discovered a new world of thought to me. For afterward, as I traveled on my lonely way eastward, I never saw a church in the little villages that were stationed thirty miles apart, with no intervening civilization, but the thought arose, ‘Who is this Man that he can do these wonderful things?’ Voltaire’s sneers, the arguments of Hume, the ribaldry of Paine, vanished like matinal mist in the effort to reply. For, see, sixty generations have come and gone, crop after crop of men have been reaped by the mower death, since, in an obscure and lonely village of a remote and despised province of the Roman empire, a babe was born whose reputed parents were poor Jewish peasants; a carpenter’s son, who, without culture, without social position, without political power, uttered words that have ever since moulded the lives of the greatest, the most powerful, the best, the wisest, aye, and the vilest also, of the most enlightened continents of the world. History, since this young man died, has been a mere record of struggles either to assist or resist his dominion. He left no written word; and yet the human race has bowed before the reports of his sayings by the waysides of Galilee and the deserts of Judea, to a group of fishermen and crowds of the despised of the earth. I never saw a church in these frontier settlements without feeling a sense of awe as I thought of the origin of the religion it represented. Scenes like these and thoughts like these opened the heart to reply, in the words of earnest Peter, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.’”—Sel.