The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 56

and the world became a vast battlefield. For hundreds of years the church
of Christ found refuge in seclusion and obscurity. Thus says the prophet:
“The woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared
of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and
three-score days.” Revelation 12:6.
The accession of the Roman Church to power marked the beginning
of the Dark Ages. As her power increased, the darkness deepened. Faith
was transferred from Christ, the true foundation, to the pope of Rome.
Instead of trusting in the Son of God for forg iveness of sins and for
eternal salvation, the people looked to the pope, and to the priests and
prelates to whom he delegated authority. They were taught that the pope
was their earthly mediator and that none could approach God except
through him; and, further, that he stood in the place of God to them and
was therefore to be implicitly obeyed. A deviation from his requirements
was sufficient cause for the severest punishment to be visited upon the
bodies and souls of the offenders. Thus the minds of the people were
turned away from God to fallible, erring, and cruel men, nay, more, to the
prince of darkness himself, who exercised his power through them. Sin
was disguised in a garb of sanctity. When the Scriptures are suppressed,
and man comes to regard himself as supreme, we need look only for
fraud, deception, and debasing iniquity. With the elevation of human
laws and traditions was manifest the corruption that ever results from
setting aside the law of God.
Those were days of peril for the church of Christ. The faithful
standard-bearers were few indeed. Though the truth was not left without
witnesses, yet at times it seemed that error and superstition would wholly
prevail, and true religion would be banished from the earth. The gospel
was lost sight of, but the forms of religion were multiplied, and the
people were burdened with rigorous exactions.
They were taught not only to look to the pope as their mediator, but
to trust to works of their own to atone for sin. Long pilgrimages, acts of
penance, the worship of relics, the

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