Discount on Dullness

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 30, 1873

Discount on Dullness.

—The New York Observer, being a religious paper, may be appropriately heard on the question treated below:—

The time has gone by for dull preachers. The activities of the age, the diffusion of knowledge by schools, books, and periodicals, the spirit of inquiry, the spread of infidelity, the prevalence of doubt, the subtlety of false science, demand live, strong, earnest, capable men to preach the gospel. It will not answer to educate dullness or mediocrity. It was forbidden that a son of Aaron should be a priest if he had any blemish. Even a flat nose excluded him. And the age wants no half-baked ministers. The West will not hear them. The East cannot bear them. The heathen know too much to take them. They are not wanted on this earth. To get money to educate dull boys because they are so pious, is robbing God, and a fraud upon the church. It is a crime or a blunder, and, sometimes, both.