Flee from Babylon

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 25, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 45.

Flee from Babylon.

IT is cheap and easy for people to walk through a museum of ancient armor and rusty weapons, and make jokes concerning the outworn artillery of their forefathers. But to those forefathers, those same weapons were the concomitants of bloody and tremendous struggles, in which trifling and wit were put far away. So it is easy for Tennyson, in a poem, to make fun of a preacher for "loud-mouthed anti-Babylonianisms," i. e., for thundering against the church of Rome. But if we turn to a greater poet than Lord Tennyson, and one who lived in a more solemn and more earnest age than this, we may find that he ends a magnificent sonnet, perhaps the most magnificent, by an anti-Babylonianism. That sonnet begins with a cry as if it were of the souls beneath the altar. Listen to John Milton:—

"Avenge, O God, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold." Yes, he begins it in that tone, and he ends it by a devout wish that the children "Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

And there was another man, who, by the grace of God, had enough substance in him to carve a hundred modern poets out of—Martin Luther by name; he exhorts us thus: "Whosoever then hath any fear of God, or love unto Christ and his true religion, let him fly quickly out of this Babylon, and let him tremble at the very name of the Papacy. For the impiety and abomination thereof is so horrible that no man is able to express it with words, neither can it be otherwise seen than with spiritual eyes only."—Watchman.