p. 372 | Nearing the End by F.

Signs Publishing Co. · Melbourne, Victoria · Jun 14, 1920

FromAustraliasian Signs of the Times, Vol. 35, No. 24.

Nearing the End

By F.

“FOR a variety of reasons,” says A. Wyatt Tilby in the London Outlook of March 27, “some psychological but mostly political, the Church of Rome is making little headway in England. But on the Continent its advance during the past twenty years has been amazing; in the next twenty its progress will probably be still more considerable. The causes of this revival are so intimately connected with modern thought that they deserve some attention.”

The writer then goes on to identify those causes. He assures us that Rationalism is become the half-way house between Protestantism and Catholicism, and that Spiritualism is also greatly assisting in the process of turning Protestants into Catholics. To use his own words:—

Protestantism is dying—dying in childbirth of its legitimate but unwanted son, Rationalism. Nobody who has seen anything of Lutheranism or Calvinism on the Continent can doubt the fact. . . . The reasons for the evident and admitted failure of Rationalism to hold those whom Protestantism has lost must be discussed in another paper; but a word may here be added regarding the fallacy of the assumption that the long battle with superstition and credulity is drawing to a close. The grosser forms have been hounded out of the Church, only to reappear in the current practice and doctrines of Spiritualism. Three centuries have passed since England believed in relics of the dead, but Sir A. Conan Doyle has now proclaimed their efficacy. Rationalism slowly killed the belief in witchcraft and demonology and possession; but the ordinary Spiritualist openly teaches demonology, and possession is an integral and necessary part of his creed. And if anybody is so credulous as to believe that the day of credulity is over, a few shillings spent on recent occult literature should speedily reassure him that folly did not die out with our fathers.

Of the major portion of professed Protestantism the above, we regret to say, is not far from fact. Having in many instances dropped the “protest” out of Protestantism, there are thousands who, while nominally retaining their affiliation with Protestantism, are, as far as practice is concerned, linked up with either Catholicism or Spiritualism. And such a condition of affairs was foreseen by Jehovah and recorded in His ancient Book, for in Revelation 16 we find three great powers grouped together—the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet, and careful study of these three powers shows them to be Spiritualism (the latest manifestation of the dragon’s power), Roman Catholicism (the successor of pagan Rome), and apostate Protestantism (with its denial of many Bible truths). Moreover, when these three are in operation together, the Bible student knows that the end of all things is near at hand. F.