Another Voice from Babylon.
By G. W. Pond
A few months ago, while conversing with a minister of the gospel on the end of the wicked, I discovered another evidence of the confusion that exists among orthodox teachers relative to the teachings of the Bible, and, of course, another reason for the confusion of ideas that prevails among the different denominations of Christians. “Taking,” said he, “such words as death, destroy, eternal, &c., in their primary and ordinary sense, the Scriptures plainly teach the annihilation of the wicked;” and yet he believes and teaches that they teach just the opposite. Primary and ordinary, indeed! But how are we to understand them? Why not take them as they read, giving every word its ordinary meaning? It has always been taught by some, that in order to understand the Bible we must be highly educated. But here the “plot thickens;” if we take it as it reads, it will lead us into error and into the pit. Well might the prophet call these “perilous times,” when an otherwise intelligent man, a teacher of the people, will teach those who repose confidence in him, and look to him as their spiritual guide, such a doctrine as that, putting “light for darkness and darkness for light,” and substituting for God’s everlasting truth, “profane and old wives’ fables.” Very perilous indeed are these times to the people who will persist in “heaping to themselves teachers having itching ears;” who are willing to have “their ears turned from the truth, and turned unto fables.” Let us thank God, brethren, that he has left on record his will concerning us, which we are able to understand, and which is able to save us. Hence it is “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”