THE PROPHETIC CONFERENCE.
Of this conference just held in New York, as previously noticed in the REVIEW, the papers the past week have had more or less to say. One effect of the conference is already very apparent, and that is it is developing the real infidelity which exists among the different denominations on the question of the second coming of Christ. The leading religious journals do not consider it beneath their dignity to speak out in reference to such a meeting and the views there advocated; and in speaking, their real opinions come to light. Their views of prophecy are little less than astonishing. One thinks prophecy can be understood only after it has been fulfilled! Why, then, was it given? Of what conceivable use is it? After the Lord has come, we shall all know it; but we can know nothing of it beforehand. Such is their position. It is true that all men will at last be Adventists. But one class will become convinced when it is too late to receive any benefit from such conviction. All the antediluvians were at last converted to the preaching of Noah; but their conversion came too late to be of any advantage to them. They were probably acting on this profound principle that they could not understand prophecy till after it was fulfilled, but after that they would know all about it. And so they did; but they perished in their foolish experiment. Another thinks that though prophecies in the past have all been fulfilled literally, it does not follow that those in reference to the second coming of Christ are to be fulfilled in the same manner. But why should we not take them so? Why abruptly and violently depart from the rule established by all previous fulfillments, with no apparent occasion for so doing? Such a course can be explained only on the ground that persons prefer to spiritualize all these prophecies, to correspond with their preconceived opinions. The destruction of the world by the flood was literal. The overthrow of Sodom by fire and brimstone was literal. As it was in the days of Noah and of Lot, so, says Christ himself, shall it be in the day when the Son of man is to be revealed. Could he teach any more explicitly that the prophecies of his second coming are to be taken literally? And if they are not to be taken literally, how shall we take them? Thus these teachers would take away from us the key of knowledge. Another considers it the “gospel of despair” to suppose that “the thousands of millions of the world’s present population are about to be suddenly and utterly surrendered to the devil, leaving nothing better than the history of Sodom and Lot as the type of this world’s history even under the dispensation of the gospel of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Tell it to a Jew, but not to a Christian.” But unfortunately for this writer, this is the very illustration which Christ himself uses to set forth the condition of the world at his coming. As it was in the days of Lot, thus shall it be in the days when the Son of man is revealed. Luke 17:28-30. If we put off this coming to the end of the millennium, does it help the matter any? Does it grate any less harshly upon the mind to suppose that after all men have been converted, and so lived a thousand years, they are to suffer such a terrible apostasy that Christ at his coming would scarcely find faith on the earth, and all but a few would perish at last, after so much light and glory, like the antediluvians and the Sodomites? What kind of a gospel is this? Tell it to a Jew, says this writer, but not to a Christian. Just so the Jews said in reference to the great facts of Christ’s first advent. Tell them to a Christian, but not to a Jew. Thus both Jews and Christians have shown themselves to be in the same condition: each ready to accept the truth rejected by the other, but both equally blind to the truth which belongs to their own time.