Holiness Running Wild by Editor

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 22, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 20.

Holiness Running Wild.

By Editor

THERE is a paper published in Oakland, Cal., called The Day Dawn, which for vagaries and wildness in the interpretation of the Scriptures, exceeds anything with which we have ever met. It professes to hold that this holiness preaching is the opening of a new dispensation. As these people have been for sometime sanctified to disobedience of the law of God, so they are now become so holy as to reject the ordinances of Christ. Read the following:—

"Again, there are many holiness people who are living in disregard of the ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper. If we are yet under the old dispensation, they are committing a sin. If, however, this be the dispensation of the coming of Christ, then we are freed from the obligation to keep these ordinances, just as the early disciples were freed from offering animal sacrifices, because they are fulfilled. Paul says, in Romans 5:3, 'Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?' But we are preaching not the crucifixion and death, but the resurrection into newness of life with Christ. The baptism of death has no place in the day of the transfigured Lord."

And we find a score of things in this one paper as wild as the above. They profess to be the angels with whom the Lord has come in flaming fire, 1 Thess. 1: the fire being the power of the truth they are preaching! Holiness preachers are the angels who are gathering the tares out of the field to burn them. But the Saviour said, "the tares are the children of the wicked one." They are not deeds, but doers; they are not actions, but actors. Their interpretation would make the Saviour teach his disciples to let error grow undisturbed lest they should do violence to the truth! But if they think they have a calling to bind the tares, the children of the wicked one, to burn them, they had better get a dispensation from the pope of Rome, for he has claimed a monopoly of that business for a thousand years or more. The next?