p. 98 | The Power of Custom

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Feb 18, 1886

The Power of Custom.

It is difficult for people to see the error of that which has the sanctions of age and of numbers. There was an old philosophy which said, "Whatever is, is right." Many religious teachers of to-day have adopted the substance of this maxim with respect to many religious practices, even though they repudiate the form of the utterance. The fact that certain practices are found to-day in the church, and that they are so nearly universal, seems to them conclusive evidence that such practices must be right; and, starting from this conclusion, and because religious practices ought to have their basis in Bible teaching, not a little ingenuity is displayed in the effort to first read such practices into the Bible in order that they may be taught from the Bible. This is notably the case with the practice of infant baptism and the observance of the so-called Sunday Sabbath. If a man is pressed for his Scripture authority for either practice, his reply is quite likely to be, in substance, "Nearly the whole church observes these practices, and ecclesiastical history shows that they are of very long standing." And then the baptism of Lydia and her household is quoted, and the inference is forced into the text that since Lydia had a household to be baptized, there must, of course, have been infants in it at that time; and a single passage in which mention is made of a special meeting held on the first day of the week, which is mentioned only by that name, is made to stand for a fixed custom of observing the day. But the stress of the argument lies in the long-standing and well-nigh universal custom of the church. If men could trace the history of such things a little more carefully, and especially if they could get a correct view of the times in which, the men by whom, and the purposes for which, these practices were introduced, it would perhaps shake their confidence a little in the correctness of the theory that whatever the church has done and is doing must be right, and send them back to look for a more Biblical interpretation of the Bible upon these points.—Sabbath Recorder.