respectability . They are called to suffer with Christ , but they shrink from even reproach .... Apostasy , apostasy , apostasy , is engraven on the very front of every church ; and did they know it , and did they feel it , there might be hope ; but , alas ! they cry , ' We are rich , and increased in goods , and stand in need of nothing .'" --Second Advent Library , tract No . 39 .
The great sin charged against Babylon is that she " made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication ." This cup of intoxication which she presents to the world represents the false doctrines that she has accepted as the result of her unlawful connection with the great ones of the earth . Friendship with the world corrupts her faith , and in her turn she exerts a corrupting influence upon the world by teaching doctrines which are opposed to the plainest statements of Holy Writ .
Rome withheld the Bible from the people and required all men to accept her teachings in its place . It was the work of the Reformation to restore to men the word of God ; but is it not too true that in the churches of our time men are taught to rest their faith upon their creed and the teachings of their church rather than on the Scriptures ? Said Charles Beecher , speaking of the Protestant churches : " They shrink from any rude word against creeds with the same sensitiveness with which those holy fathers would have shrunk from a rude word against the rising veneration of saints and martyrs which they were fostering . . . . The Protestant evangelical denominations have so tied up one another ' s hands , and their own , that , between them all , a man cannot become a preacher at all , anywhere , without accepting some book besides the Bible .... There is nothing imaginary in the statement that the creed power is now beginning to prohibit the Bible as really as Rome did , though in a subtler way ." --Sermon on " The Bible a Sufficient Creed ," delivered at Fort Wayne , Indiana , Feb . 22 , 1846 .
When faithful teachers expound the word of God , there arise men of learning , ministers professing to understand the Scriptures , who denounce sound doctrine as heresy , and thus turn away inquirers after truth . Were it not that the world is hopelessly intoxicated with the wine of Babylon , multitudes would be convicted and converted by the plain , cutting truths of the word of God . But religious faith appears so confused and discordant that the people know not what to believe as truth . The sin of the world ' s impenitence lies at the door of the church .
The second angel ' s message of Revelation 14 was first preached in the summer of 1844 , and it then had a more direct application to the churches of the United States , where the warning of the judgment had been most widely proclaimed and most generally rejected , and where the declension in the churches had been most rapid . But the message of the second angel did not reach its complete fulfillment in 1844 . The churches then experienced a moral fall , in
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