The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 390
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 consequence of their refusal
of the light of the advent message; but that fall was not complete. As
they have continued to reject the special truths for this time they have
fallen lower and lower. Not yet, however, can it be said that “Babylon
is fallen,... because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath
of her fornication.” She has not yet made all nations do this. The spirit
of world conforming and indifference to the testing truths for our time
exists and has been gaining ground in churches of the Protestant faith in
all the countries of Christendom; and these churches are included in the
solemn and terrible denunciation of the second angel. But the work of
apostasy has not yet reached its culmination.
The Bible declares that before the coming of the Lord, Satan will
work “with all power and signs and lying wonders,
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