MUCH IN LITTLE | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 28, 1878

"MUCH IN LITTLE."

JUST REASONING.

PROF. HUDSON, compiler of a valuable Greek Concordance, of the New Testament, says: "We regard man as created not absolutely immortal, but in a certain sense for immortality; i. e., immortality was his natural and proper destination. He was designed to be immortal in the same sense in which he was designed for eternal life; or as the chief end of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. In this view we maintain that the guilty failure of eternal life brings the penal forfeiture of immortality."

IN THE REFORMATION.

Among the reformers, with Luther at their head, the number who denied the immortality of the soul was so great that Calvin wrote a work against them. In his preface he said: "They are said to circulate their follies in a kind of tracts which I have not happened to see." He is not the only one who has written against the arguments on this subject without examining them. So violent and bitter was his language that he published a second edition apologizing for the first, acknowledging that there were good men among the teachers of that view. Dr. Priestly said: "It was, however, the firm belief of so many of the reformers of that age that, had it not been for the authority of Calvin, who wrote expressly against it, the doctrine of an intermediate state would, in all probability, have been effectually exploded as the doctrine of purgatory itself."

"DARK—DARK—DARK"—DR. BARNES.

"These are real not imaginary difficulties . . . . I confess, for one, I feel them, and feel them the more sensibly and powerfully the more I look at them, and the longer I live. . . . . I do not know that I have a ray of light on this subject, which I had not when the subject first flashed across my soul. I have read, to some extent, what wise and good men have written. I have looked at their various theories and explanations. I have endeavored to weigh their arguments, for my whole soul pants for light and relief on these questions. But I get neither; and in the distress and anguish of my own spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one ray to disclose to me the reason why sin came into the world; why the earth is strewed with the dying and the dead, and why man must suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a moment's ease to my tortured mind. . . . . It is all dark—dark, to my soul, and I cannot disguise it."

—Prac. Serms. by A. Barnes.