IS THE WATCH RIGHT?

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 1, 1880

IS THE WATCH RIGHT?

DR. JOHNSON said of Bishop Burnett, that “he was like a man who resolves to regulate his own time by a certain watch, but will not inquire whether the watch is right or not.”

In many persons there is observable an easy tendency to regulate their religious belief by some standard which they take for granted to be right, without seriously examining the grounds of its conceded authority. In the Catholic church, the priest, who is a second-hand pope, is the standard time-piece by which all the lay-watches are regulated. What the priest declares to be God’s truth is accepted as such, without, in most cases we fear, an earnest and prayerful inquiry into his claim to infallibility.

And among Protestants, are there not many that blindly set their belief by the minister or the creed, rather than by an intelligent and devout study of God’s word? If so, wherein are they better than superstitious Romanists? You may be all correct according to your standard, but what if that shall prove to be false? Let us take nothing second-handed. Let us try all human time-pieces by the great chronometer, constructed by him whose existence is measured only by eternity—the infallible word of truth.—Sel.