The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 389
The spirit of worldly conformity is invading the churches throughout
Christendom. Robert Atkins, in a sermon preached in London, draws a
dark picture of the spiritual declension that prevails in England: “The
truly righteous are diminished from the earth, and no man layeth it to
heart. The professors of religion of the present day, in every church, are
lovers of the world, conformers to the world, lovers of creature comfort,
and aspirers after 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 t hat 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
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