Truth versus Error by Arthur V. Fox

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 20, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 24.

Truth versus Error

By Arthur V. Fox

Will truth prevail? Christ says, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." See Luther, a solitary monk, rising against a power that made kings do homage and earth tremble. Tetzel, clothed with the thunders of the Vatican, burns his theses with ignominy, and denounces him as a damnable heretic; but he stands. A thousand barbed ecclesiastical arrows quiver on the string, directed at his heart; but he trembles not. He meets the papal legate at Augsburg, and mildly, firmly maintains his position, lamenting that he is regarded as the leading adversary of the whole church of God on earth, yet speaking with unfaltering accent. Summoned to battle against the combined powers of Church and State, in the Diet at Worms, his friends gather around him to dissuade him, urging that they who burned his writings would burn his body. "I would go if I knew there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on the houses," is his grand reply. Truth is invincible. God has His moral as well as His physical laws, and they are uniform and irresistible. Yet men sometimes league against them. They collect in some city or plain, and seizing some great cord of the moral universe, they say, "Go to, now, let us break this band, and cast away this cord from us;" but "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision." Men may gather a great party, and get a great name, and manufacture a great deal of brick, and mix a great deal of mortar, and build a great Babel, and get a great many offices and emoluments, in opposing moral truth; but there runs through human nature a great feeling of moral obligation, which, sooner or later, will break into a thousand fragments any party that sets itself in opposition to the laws of the universe.

Truth crushed to earth will rise again, The eternal years of God are hers.

Truth asks no protection from civil government. As Luther said, "The good man looks up into God's beautiful arch and fears not lest it should fall, tho he see not and feel not any pillars; so he looks up to truth, and tho it be encompassed with clouds, and, without visible support, he knows there is a bow of promise to span it, an eternal arm to bear it up." Truth must eventually prevail, whatever man may say or do.

O, love the truth, and the truth will make you free! Why should you love error? It comes from the evil one, and will only lead you downward to destruction.

ARTHUR V. FOX.