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BAPTIZED INFIDELITY

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 30, 1879

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 54, No. 19.

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BAPTIZED INFIDELITY.

Canon Farrar, whose “Life of Christ” has had a wide circulation, has now written a work entitled, “Life and Work of Saint Paul,” which is published in two large volumes by E. N. Dutton & Co. From a notice of this work in The Independent of Oct. 16, we take the following paragraph:—
“He regards the apostle as mistaken in some of his views as to our Lord’s second coming, but protects himself from a charge of heresy here by insisting that this was a subject on which revelation was expressly withheld. The work is conceived in the most reverent and believing spirit.”
This last sentence, in view of what precedes it, sounds like the most biting sarcasm. What reverence or what faith is there in treating the writings of the apostle in this manner? Paul wrote by inspiration; yet creed-bound, spiritually dead, withered-away and plucked-up theologians, eighteen hundred years afterward, discover that he undertook to write upon a subject upon which revelation had been “expressly withheld;” and although he treated it just as though it was a subject which had been, like other truths, revealed to him, yet he made a mistake!
Not a whit more astonishing would it be for some one to arise and say, “The evangelists were mistaken in what they wrote about there ever being such a person as Jesus Christ here on the earth; but then, I must not be accounted a heretic for so writing, because this is a point on which information was ‘expressly withheld.’”
It is said that one verse in every 35 of the entire New Testament, and one in every 25 in Paul’s writings, speaks of the second coming of the Lord. Talk about revelation being “expressly withheld” on such a subject as that! The very ink should blush that records the thought. We suspect this plan is adopted as the only way to get rid of the great doctrine of the second coming of Christ. But any subject in all the Bible could be set aside in the same way, and with just as much reason. This is the baldest kind of infidelity, and all the worse because it comes from the pen of a churchman, and under the sanction of religion.