The Age of Liars | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 13, 1863

The Age of Liars.

EXAGGERATION and a love for the marvelous, are characteristics of the present age. A writer in the N. Y. Observer truthfully remarks:

We have become a nation of liars! Most people love to read and to hear lies quite as well as others like to write and to utter them. Indeed the one is a pretty fair guage of the other. The market and the supply of lies are economically adjusted.

I have considerable sympathy for liar-makers and liar-mongers. They often do not like the business, but their bread and butter is in it. The public will have lies, and the man who must get his bread and butter by writing, must have no scruples about lying. One of the most popular writers of a New York journal, said to me pathetically: "I detest this coloring of the truth, this eternal exaggeration of lying; but the people will have it, and I must furnish it, or starve." Another popular writer, on recovering from a dangerous illness, told his physician that he should not be able to pay him, until he had got his returns from furnishing the public another of his lucrative stories. Such writers are considered smart. They wake up our imaginations, rouse our sympathies, play charmingly upon our passions, and we pay them well for it.

The public hankering for something extraordinary, startling, highly colored and exaggerated, has crept into our churches, invaded the pews, and to some extent given laws to the pulpit. There is now a great demand for smart preachers. The question is not whether a preacher is pious, prayerful, faithful, sound in faith and a winner of souls; one who rightly divides the Word of truth, and gives to every man his portion in due season;—all this is behind the times and old fogy. Is he smart? That's the question. Does he stretch the Indian-rubber to its utmost tension, and hammer out the precious grain of gold so thin that it has but one side? Can he do a splendid business on a small capital? Does he sparkle well? O, then he is an angel standing in the sun! We must have him at any price. What's the use of going to the theatre when we can have what we want at church? But will he also, as occasion may require, let off good round whoppers, thumping stories, and rouse us all up? Then he is the man for us. He will fill the house, sell the pews, youthfulize the congregation, and make us a good speculation.

Far be it from me to say that all congregations are of this type. But the tendency is in this direction; and unless resisted, will work fearful sin and ruin.