Losing, and Why?

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 24, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 12.

Recently the pastor of a Baptist Church in West Newton, Mass., gave up his pastorate and became a pastor of a Congregational Church. It is spoken of as “not a mere incident.” To some it indicates with other things a decided decline in the Baptist denomination. During the year 1906 to 1907 in Great Britain there was a falling off in the Baptist membership of 4,854. The returns for 1908 show a decrease of 5,869. In the Sunday-schools there was a falling off of 115 teachers and 8,815 scholars. At the center of the great “revival” in Wales the decrease was 1,835. What is the reason?—Baptists have ceased to stand for the word of God. As higher criticism and evolution have come in, soul regeneration and believers’ baptism have come to mean less; and there are those who consider the Scriptural ordinance of baptism of little worth. Baptists have more and more fellowshiped error. They have said in substance to their children, their young people, their converts: “The form, the ordinance, does not matter if the heart is right.” Then why did Jesus, the Wisdom of God, give the ordinance? We find Baptists observing “Easter,” and “Christmas,” and Sunday, days utterly unscriptural; and they are leaving the consistent, strong Baptist position to enforce the latter by civil law, at the same time the strong, clear testimony of the word concerning baptism is ignored. The result is weakness and loss. The only way for a church or individual to advance is to walk in the light. In these days that includes all of God’s downtrodden truth.

Victims taken from the ruins of the earthquake in Italy.

Copyright, 1908, Underwood & Underwood, New York.

A movement has started in Chicago to, if possible, place the Bible in the public schools of the State of Illinois. Their plea is voiced by the Rev. E. R. Worrell: “The family altar is being discarded and the young have no religious instruction in the public schools. Instead of improving on the example set by the Puritans, we are drifting away from it and I am frank to say that I believe that dark days are ahead for this country unless we can return to that ideal standard.” But if the Bible is not taught or reverenced in the home, what hope is there of getting help from it in the school? And who is to teach it? While in many of our churches and Sunday-schools the Bible is considered partly, if not almost wholly, mythical and figurative, while those who profess to be loyal to God are setting aside the great law around which the Bible centers, and the miracles upon which the very plan of salvation is based, what hope is there that we could have the Bible taught in the public schools? Out of that very teaching would grow more disrespect for the Bible than reverence. If the moral instruction is lacking in the home and in the church, there is little hope for the children. We can not look to the public schools to lift them above the moral influences manifest in these other circles.