An Acknowledged Test by Editor

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 27, 1879

An Acknowledged Test.

By Editor

THE lecture of Col. Ingersoll on the “mistakes of Moses,” has called forth many good things, among which we class the following, being the closing sentences of a lecture by Hon. George R. Welding:—

“To my mind, hypocrisy in the church means infidelity in the church. I do not say that infidels outside of the church are hypocrites, but I do say that your deliberate hypocrite inside the church is an infidel. Hold fast the thought, then, when the great apostle of infidelity comes into your midst and denounces the bad men inside the church, hold fast to the thought that hypocrisy in the church means infidelity in the church, and then let all the people say, God speed Ingersoll in scouring his own disciples. Every rule of reason drives us irresistibly to the conclusion that the man who deliberately uses Christianity for no other purpose than as a cloak for evil deeds is necessarily an unbeliever in disguise. Let the war go on, then, until public sentiment shall brand as worse than a thief the infidel who steals the livery of Christianity, and Ingersoll's secret worshipers be dragged by the force of public opinion from the sacred altars they disgrace. Gentlemen, have you ever thought of it—a good man is to-day a good man only as he approaches the standard of Bible-taught morality.

“Grant that an infidel may be a good man too, and many of them are exemplary citizens, yet it can come about only by his approaching in action a standard which he repudiates in words. Ingersoll personally and Ingersoll theoretically are two beings as wide apart as civilization and barbarism. The world may well believe the one to be a good citizen. The most notorious outlaw known in the criminal annals of the West, Frank Rande, stood a few months ago at the bars of his cell in St. Louis, the very impersonation of every crime, and with the air of a braggart, said to preachers, priests, and policemen, to throngs of men and women, “I am a Bob-Ingersoll man,” and every man and woman in the land believed him. Had this or any other such criminal declared himself a religious man, every infidel in the land would have declared the man a hypocrite and his assertion false. It is no answer to tell us that perhaps in the cell adjoining his lay a man who for five and twenty years was prominent in the church, and was at last detected in a series of gigantic thefts and forgeries, for let him but step to his prison door and say, “I am a Christian man,” and all the civilized world cries out, “The man is a liar!” . . . As citizens loving the country bequeathed to us by the men and spirit of ’76, as business men striving for success by honorable endeavor, as men who love home and household, no matter whether we be in the church or out, we cannot afford to let the infidelity of Ingersoll supplant Christianity.”