A Severe Arraignment

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 15, 1902

A Severe Arraignment

ANOTHER comment on the destructive effect of the “higher criticism” upon the Christian faith and efficiency comes from the Rev. W. T. Euster, pastor of the Wheaton Methodist church in Evanston, Ill. For a year Mr. Euster has had charge of this church, which is located near the Methodist university at Evanston, and he makes these statements after having investigated the religious conditions developed by the course of study at the Garrett Biblical Institute, which is a part of the university. He found that out of over one hundred men in the junior and senior classes less than a dozen were capable religiously and spiritually of leading a prayer meeting. “Evanston,” he says, “receives every year the cream of Methodism all over the land, and generally sends it back skim milk so far as Methodism and the Bible are concerned.” As quoted in the Chicago Tribune, he said further:—

The worst things are not upon the surface, and those who live outside this pretty city do not know the real undercurrent of affairs theological. In all that makes up true religion and faith in Christ this place should be at the apex; for with all this cream coming in each year, there should be power enough to overcome any doubting spirit that might linger here among these beautiful groves and walks. But what really does take place?

Then, after mentioning that there was one instructor in the university whose teaching supported the idea that the work of the Holy Spirit can be explained by hypnotism, and that all religious experience is but a manifestation of animalism, he continued:—

This I have found: That of all the Biblical students I have become acquainted with during this time, and I have questioned many, only four have I found with little enough of infidelity and Unitarianism in them to make it possible for me to vote for them as pastor if I were on some official board in any Methodist church in the land.

I had a number of the seniors and juniors in Garrett run over the little book of members there printed by the institute, and asked them to mark each student of theology who was capable religiously and spiritually to lead acceptably a prayer meeting, and hold his own evangelistic meeting, for the church is speaking loudly about every man his own evangelist. None of these knew that others had done the same thing. Not one senior was marked. Only a few, comparatively, of all were marked—less than a dozen in over a hundred! . . .

Some of these young men are going out to preach in Methodist pulpits with a faith but little better than that of Tom Paine expressed in his “Age of Reason.” The trend is toward mere naturalism, and a sort of Unitarianism that Channing would not have accepted in all its phases. I have not found one who would acknowledge that Jesus Christ knew as much about the Old Testament as do these modern professors! The Christ they talk and preach about is not the Christ of the Bible, but the one conjured up in the imagination filled and fumed with German rationalism, and this Christ is constantly changing.

This is the fruit of the tree, and by its fruit the tree is known.