p. 5 | Make It Simple by I. S. Spencer

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 17, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 11.

Make It Simple.

By I. S. Spencer

MANY of our treatises on the subject of faith (having a kind of Germanizing about them — a kind of crazy philosophizing), are so filled up with explanations and labored justifications, and attempted analogies, that they have more tendency to awaken doubt than call forth faith. They have just the effect to make the reader believe that the authors are not themselves quite certain of the thing, since they take so much pains to demonstrate, explain, and justify it. They appear to go back of God’s word, and invite other people to go along with them, as if God’s word needed the props of their philosophy

. This is no aid to faith. Let us “take God at His word.” No philosophy can prop up a divine promise, or build a scaffold to reach it.—Some of our theologians, having a kind of German baptism, are more likely to make infidels than to make Christians. The same thing may be said of a great deal of modern religious literature — filled with philosophy, “falsely so called.” —I. S. Spencer, D.D.