OUTSIDE TESTIMONY by Wm. S. Foote

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 6, 1862

OUTSIDE TESTIMONY.

By Wm. S. Foote

H. W. Beecher, in a discourse published in the N. Y. Independent of March 27, says: "I know not of a single nation, where now any painter would make his ideal man stand, as the old painters made theirs, with head lifted up, and with reverential expression, as if seeking communion with God. If you would paint your ideal man in that way, people would gaze at him and say, What is he looking at? What does he see? They would imagine perhaps that he saw a balloon, or something that other people could not see, which he might turn to profit! Our national thought, and feeling, and genius, and power, are material. We are a scientific people; we are an inventive people; we are a calculating people, we are a thrifty and accumulating people. Men are controlling the crust of the globe. They are piercing mines, bridging rivers, breaking through mountains, building continents of ships; they are digging, weaving, building, creating, accumulating, as they have never done before. Men are fond of weighing and measuring—the yard-stick and the scales are their deities. People go to church and hear about unknown things, and things not seen, and accept them as the arabesque of Christianity. But a faith in these things, on which a man may lay his whole weight, that shall inspire his conduct, that shall penetrate his life with a divine enthusiasm—there is little of that."

We have sufficient evidence of the truth of our position, without asking for the testimony of those who, we must think, are "blind leaders of the blind." But when they unwittingly bear witness in favor of the truth, we cannot reject it. The testimony above is, that now, in the days of the coming of the Son of man, or during the days of the proclamation of his coming, the scriptures which refer to the actions of the children of men at this time, are being fulfilled to the letter. People do not heed the proclamation; but as it was in the days of Lot, and of Noah, the things of this world almost wholly take up the attention, indeed they are planting and building, "creating and accumulating, as they have never done before," the yard-stick and scales being their deities. And in addition to this, "People go to church and hear about unknown things, and things not seen," but with regard to "faith which works by love and purifies the heart," there is little of that. So that the great mass of mankind, instead of being converted to God, are ripening for the sudden destruction which is soon to overtake the wicked rejecters of God's holy law.

WM. S. FOOTE.