No Longer Divided

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 2, 1915

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 42, No. 43.

No Longer Divided

SOME weeks ago, the “Interdenominational Ministers’ Association” of Oregon voted to “recommend that the high schools give a credit for Bible study outside of school.” And in their discussion they said:

“The churches in recent years have progressed. They no longer divide on old-time questions of doctrine. Most of them agree that religion seeks results for the common good rather than methods; that men, women, and children have the option of believing many things which were once thought essential.”

One of the things for thinking people to consider is that when great theological bodies are “no longer divided,” they become more and more intolerant. Men get intoxicated with the vastness of their numbers and the fact that they are standing together on some propositions that to them are great, and the tendency is to be very impatient with those who would oppose them.

The war now raging among so-called Christian nations, and which is so indescribable in its barbarities, is convincing many that this age gives no exception to the Bible statement that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Jer. 17:9. And it will yet be seen that regardless of our great “enlightenment,” and “civilization,” and “brotherhood of man,” this age will also demonstrate the accuracy of the prophetic predictions which have foretold that this age will produce the worst and the most completely universal religious despotism that the world has ever known anything about.

The evidence is beyond question that appearances are very deceiving. We must place our confidence and trust in the living Word, and in the living God, who searches the heart and tries the reins (Jer. 17:10), and who alone knows how to enlighten the human family in regard to their tendencies and what they will so blindly do.