DOES IT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE?
When God reveals his truth to the world, does it make any difference with them whether they believe it and receive it or not? When the Bible points out any great system of iniquity, describes it as a blasphemous, Heaven-daring organization, and warns God's people against it, does it make any difference whether we regard it in this light, or whether we fraternize with it, excuse its offenses against High Heaven, and canonize its apostles? This query is suggested by the deification now accorded to the late pope, Pius IX, by some Protestant divines. For instance, H. W. Beecher, in Brooklyn, Feb. 11, spoke of him as follows:— “With all the complications of instructions, and doctrines, and usages, one would think, standing as we do in the simplicity of Protestant faith, these would have smothered his best nature and turned him out to be merely a hierarch. But his sweetness, simplicity, love, unaffected piety, very generous personal wishes toward all, showed that, notwithstanding all the surrounding influences and circumstances, his love of God and man was so strong in him as to overpower them all, and when he died, in an instant God's angels bore him gently, as if a little child carried on its mother's breast, into the presence of the Saviour, and then a crown was put upon his head; not because he was a pope, but because a new heart had been given him just for so loving. True religion means the fellowship of pure-hearted men one with another. If any religion doesn't bring you up to that it is false, because the heart of religion is left out of it.” If to have true religion we must fellowship the head of such a system as the papacy, what difference does it make what the Bible says about these things? However many good traits Pius may have had about him, as an individual, he was the visible head of that great apostasy and system of evil, which the Bible, if we can understand it at all, so plainly points out, and so unsparingly denounces. And when that iniquitous organization shall go alive into the lake of fire, Rev. 19:20, when it shall be consumed by the spirit of Christ's mouth, and destroyed by the brightness of his coming, 2 Thess. 2:8, when it shall meet such an overthrow as is fitly illustrated by the act of the “mighty angel” when he “took up a stone like a great millstone and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all,” Rev. 18:21, we cannot believe that any pope of this age or any other, any “man of sin,” or “son of perdition,” as Paul calls the head of that system, 2 Thess. 2:3, will sit enthroned and crowned by the side of Christ, and unite his voice with the voices of his martyr victims, and the holy apostles and prophets, when they obey the divine command, “Rejoice over her; . . . for God hath avenged you on her.” Rev. 18:20. It is just such utterances as these from such popular men as Mr. Beecher, and such wholesale ignoring of all distinctions, which the Bible so clearly defines, that are paralyzing the influence of that book upon the minds of the people. They conclude at once that what it says amounts to nothing, and they are only too willing to throw it aside accordingly. The consciences of men are lulled to sleep, and thus they are being prepared to be taken by the day of the Lord as a bird in the snare of the fowler.