p. 195 | The Greatest Heresy

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 23, 1875

The Greatest Heresy

“Popery?” No. “Pelagianism?” No. “Socinianism?” No. What can it be? It is a more general and widely diffused error than either named. It creeps into families and disturbs their harmony. It lurks in neighborhoods and sets friends at variance. It steals into churches and destroys their peace. It nestles down in editorial chairs and gives to the many-tongued press its bitter words. It strides the hobbies of reform and turns them into centaurs of fury. It gets into the councils of society, and curdles their charity with its acids. It stands on either side of the imaginary line that divides a nation into sections, and hurls poisoned arrows from one side to the other. It is the very essence and incarnation of the mischief-making principle, and the archenemy of Christ. What can it be? we hear from north, south, east, and west.

Must we answer, when the very nature of the heresy is such that the subject of it is almost invariably, and by a kind of fatal necessity, unconscious of its power, and only by divine grace is ever freed from the hateful scourge? A careful reading of the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians will confirm the assertion of an excellent divine, that the greatest heresy is want of love.—Sel.