IS THE WORLD GROWING WORSE?

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 7, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 32.

“IS THE WORLD GROWING WORSE?”

SOME one in Chicago has written to Dr. A. T. Pierson, asking his opinion on this question. The question does not ask for an elaborate opinion, or for any reason for the opinion, whatever it may be. He deems the noted gentleman’s mere dictum of so much “real importance to our church life” that he asks for only a simple “yes” or “no.” But Dr. Pierson is not so presumptive as to assume the solution of such a problem in that way; so he sends the following reply, as published in Watchword and Truth for June:—

I can not by a “yes” or “no” reply to a question like yours, as such reply would be misunderstood. I hold that to have theories of our own, where the Word of God has clear teaching, is rationalism, rather than faith, and that our great peril and risk is to put our reason in the place of His revelation. We are to take God’s philosophy, even if we do not always understand it, and can not in some cases make it seem altogether desirable or even reasonable. This is only conceding that God’s thoughts are too big and wide-reaching for us to take them in or comprehend their scope.

Now, on the matter about which you inquire, the teachings both of our Lord and His apostles, and the epistle writers of the New Testament—not to go back at all to the plain teachings of the Old—are clear, and I simply accept this divine testimony and cease my vain reasoning. Let me advise you to compare a few passages of Holy Scripture which I put opposite each other, and then ask in all candor what they, unitedly, teach; and then do not be ashamed, whatever others hold or teach, to stand by the simple Bible testimony, remembering the blessing and the curse in Rev. 22:18, 19.

These thirty distinct passages could be easily quadrupled, and all of them trend in one direction. From them as a whole we may get God’s system of truth on this matter, and any candid mind will easily perceive that they unite in teaching seven things.

That the world will to the very end of the age continue to hate and oppose Christ and His true church.
That God’s method with man is not evolution, but revolution—not natural growth, but supernatural birth.
That the purpose and result of this dispensation is not the conversion of the world, but the out-gathering of the church, as a people for His name.
That the witness of the church is by separation from, not assimilation to, the world; that its great danger, therefore, is accommodation to the world, and its final state, as a whole, is apostasy.
That, to the end, there will be formalists and hypocrites in the church, and that the counterfeits of piety will be too close to be always detected by men.
That the hope, both of the church and the world, is the coming of the Lord, when the real world-wide triumphs of the Gospel will begin.
That the attitude of the believer is to be one of perpetual watching against the perils of worldliness and heresy, and waiting for the return of the Son of man.