The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 587

attentions as if they had attained an enviable distinction. Great publicity
is given to their character and crimes. The press publishes the revolting
details of vice, thus initiating others into the practice of fraud, robbery,
and murder; and Satan exults in the success of his hellish schemes. The
infatuation of vice, the wanton taking of life, the terrible increase of
intemperance and iniquity of every order and degree, should arouse all
who fear God, to inquire what can be done to stay the tide of evil.
Courts of justice are corrupt. Rulers are actuated by desire for gain
and love of sensual pleasure. Intemperance has beclouded the faculties
of many so that Satan has almost complete control of them. Jurists are
perverted, bribed, deluded. Drunkenness and revelry, passion, envy,
dishonesty of every sort, are represented among those who administer
the laws. “Justic e standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and
equity cannot enter.” Isaiah 59:14.
The iniquity and spiritual darkness that prevailed under the
supremacy of Rome were the inevitable result of her suppression of
the Scriptures; but where is to be found the cause of the widespread
infidelity, the rejection of the law of God, and the consequent corruption,
under the full blaze of gospel light in an age of religious freedom? Now
that Satan can no longer keep the world under his control by withholding
the Scriptures, he resorts to other means to accomplish the same object.
To destroy faith in the Bible serves his purpose as well as to destroy the
Bible itself. By introducing the belief that God’s law is not binding, he
as effectually leads men to transgress as if they were wholly ignorant
of its precepts. And now, as in former ages, he has worked through
the church to further his designs. The religious organizations of the
day have refused to listen to unpopular truths plainly brought to view in
the Scriptures, and in combating them they have adopted interpretations
and taken positions which have sown broadcast the seeds of skepticism.
Clinging to the papal error of natural immortality and man’s

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