HIGH-TONED RELIGION

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 27, 1880

HIGH-TONED RELIGION.

"Rev. J. Hyatt Smith," who is (at least nominally) a Baptist minister, speaking of the ordinances of the church, says:—

"I can imagine a man so high in God's grace that for him to eat and drink of the bread and wine would let him down. He is partaking of spiritual bread and wine. All members of the church are not so high, and the material supper is most convenient for them."

That is to say that some Christians are so low in God's grace that it is most fitting for them to do as Christ commands, while some have outgrown that condition!

We have often met this self-conceited religion, in various organizations. A Baptist minister once informed us that he preached a sermon so spiritual that scarcely a person in the congregation could understand him. A person of the old-fashioned Oberlin school, when driven from the usual defences of Sunday, asked us, "What difference does it make whether I keep a Sabbath or not if I am only sanctified?" A preacher of the United Brethren order, when nonplused on the same subject, replied that he did not depend on the Bible to learn his duty. He got his information in his own heart in answer to prayer. Another person of the same order said that he knew he was pleasing God in the use of tobacco, for the Lord sanctified him while he was using it, which he would not have done if the habit was wrong! We could multiply instances of this sort, but it is not necessary.

The drift of the religious world is in that direction; the tendency is to a religion resting on feeling and "experience," instead of the word of God. We believe in an experience which is formed on, and in harmony with, God's word, but not one which is substituted for the word. We believe in sanctification through the truth, (God's word is truth), John 17:17, but not in a sanctification which ignores the truth of God.

But all these notions are the outgrowth of the spiritualizing theory, invented by Origen, and just now fanned into popularity by a Satanic breeze of spirit influences. Many pulpits of the land are sowing the seed; Modern Spiritualism gathers the harvest. Opposition to the doctrine of the personal and visible advent of the Saviour—a growing contempt of the second advent of the Saviour—is drawing thousands into spiritualizing notions on this subject, and then to spiritualize or mystify all the Scriptures becomes a necessity for consistency's sake.

"To the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." Isa. 8:20.