An Empty Name | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 30, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 26.

An Empty Name.

Prof. William H. Hudson, of Stanford University, who addressed the Congress of Religions in San Francisco, on “Paganism, Christianity, and the Third Kingdom,” April 17, used the following truthful words:—

“Whatever else the world has thrown aside, it has fought hard to keep the name [Christianity]. With what result?—With the result that some of us feel that the word ‘Christianity,’ used and abused, stretched, distorted, modified, tampered with, made to bear all meanings or none, is a word that is no longer of much service in philosophical discussion. And this simply leads me to say to those who talk about Christianity being large enough to include every development of modern thought, that if you choose to continue to employ the word Christianity in the transfigured sense you propose, you have plenty of precedent at the back of you. The name that has been stretched far enough to cover decently medieval Catholicism and early New England Puritanism, the Methodism of the eighteenth century, and the Unitarianism of to-day, can doubtless be stretched still further, till it is made to embrace every new change that is coming over men’s religious conceptions at the present time.”

And how appropriate to apply to a great deal of this so-called Christianity the prophetic words of divine inspiration, “I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.” And it would be well if the following injunction of the Master were heeded: “Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast and repent.” “If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.” Rev. 3:1, 3.