Section 11. The Historical Setting of the Threefold Message - outline and explanation

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13. The Origin and Growth of the Idea of World Progress. 

14. Collapse of the Idea of World Progress.

15. The First Angel's Message

16. The Second Angel's Message

17. The Third Angel's Message

13. Origin and Growth of the Idea of World Progress

One of the points that has been in debate between Adventists and others is whether the world is growing better or worse. The trouble, generally, with our discussion of this subject is that we fail to deal with the matter in terms of the long perspective of history. The question of whether the world is improving or not is very much larger than a discussion, for example, of comparative crime statistics for a decade. This question is of the essence of the controversy that Bible- believing Christians in general, and Adventists in particular, must wage with liberal churchmen and secularists who have taught that the world is improving.

If the world, by some grand law of progress, is gradually moving toward perfection and holiness, why preach the sudden, supernatural appearing of Christ to bring in a new heaven and a new earth? But if the world "lies in wickedness," even as it lay in John's day, and is providing only increasing proofs of wickedness in devising new war plans of mutual destruction, then the Second Advent doctrine becomes not only eminently meaningful but urgently necessary. The issue at stake is precisely that.

In order to see the question in true historical perspective let us trace through the centuries this idea that the world is growing better. 14

The idea of progress, using the term in a large and loose sense to include both material and ethical progress, is not an ancient or medieval idea, but a modern one. The ancients did not believe in any law of inevitable progress toward perfection. They held a rather pessimistic, fatalistic idea of cycles, wherein nations rise, flower, and decay. That was the best paganism could offer.

View Held During Dark Ages

The church of the Dark Ages did not hold to any doctrine of unending progress, and for certain definite reasons. First, thee medieval scholars looked to ancient Greece for wisdom. They viewed Greek culture and learning as the high point in world history. Hence they were in no mood to generate the idea of progress. They tacitly, if not explicitly, held to the doctrine of retrogression.

Again, the medieval church viewed man as a fallen creature, infected with original sin and blighted with total depravity, whose end was the grave and hell, unless the grace of God intervened. A world filled with such creatures could not be viewed as making progress toward any better level, either materially or spiritually.

Finally, the medieval church believed that the world was the object of a directly intervening Providence that had marked out the limits of man's stay upon earth, and had given an element of finality to the world by setting a day of judgment and consigning the earth to flames when that day came.

As a sure protection against any impious attempt to teach otherwise, the church required all, on pain of damnation, to accept the authority of the church in all matters of doctrine and belief. Reason, as an arbiter of truth, or as the means of discovering truth, had no standing. Men were supposed to use the faculty of faith rather than reason.

Says the historian J. B. Bury: "It may surprise many to be told that the notion of Progress, which now seems so easy to apprehend, is of comparatively recent origin." - The Idea of Progress, p. 6. He observes immediately that while men of former ages had some ideas of man's advancement from savagery, this does not constitute a real doctrine of progress:

"You may conceive civilization as having gradually advanced in the past, but you have not got the idea of Progress until you go on to conceive that it is destined to advance indefinitely in the future.... It is not till the sixteenth century that the obstacles to its appearance definitely begin to he transcended and a favourable atmosphere to be gradually prepared." ibid., p. 7.

In the same connection he declares:

"As time is the very condition of the possibility of Progress, it is obvious that the idea would be valueless if there were any cogent reasons for supposing that the time at the disposal of humanity is likely to reach a limit in the near future." - Ibid., p. 5.

Descartes, a brilliant French mathematician and philosopher, who was born at the close of the sixteenth century, brought forth two germinal ideas that were to produce fruitage in skeptical and rational opposition to the basic medieval concepts. Descartes declared that reason is supreme and that the laws of nature are unalterable. To set up reason is to dethrone arbitrary authority, and to hold to the invariability of nature's laws is to do violence to the medieval concept of a superintending Providence. Bury observes that Descartes' views were "equivalent to a declaration of the Independence of Man." - Ibid., p. 65.

Seeds of New Ideas Planned

Thus in the first half of the seventeenth century were planted the seeds that were to bring forth a harvest of new views and theories, particularly the idea of progress.

There also began to develop, both on the Continent and in England, a school of thought that challenged the idea of the supremacy of Greek learning with its corollary that Greece provided the golden age and succeeding generations have witnessed only degeneracy. The position began to be taken that the present is equal in intellect and learning to any former era. It was only one step from this to the position that the present is superior to the past.

As the leaven of rebellion against Catholic Church authority and teaching began to work, new ideas as to the nature of man developed. Instead of being a creature born for destruction because of original sin, man began to be viewed by rationalists and skeptics as inherently good. This fundamental change of view paved the way for the idea that man is capable of improvement if only given an opportunity. Says Bury:

"With the extension of rationalism into the social domain, it came about naturally that the idea of intellectual progress was enlarged into the idea of the general Progress of man. The transition was easy. If it could be proved that social evils were due neither to innate and incorrigible disabilities of the human being nor to the nature of things, but simply to ignorance and prejudices, then the improvement of his state, and ultimately the attainment of felicity, would be only a matter of illuminating ignorance and removing errors, of increasing knowledge and diffusing light." - Ibid., p. 128.

Cornerstone of Modem Science

The centuries following Descartes saw the rapid growth of the belief in the invariable order of nature. That belief became the very cornerstone of all the developing sciences. A definitely mechanical theory of the universe took shape; it began to be viewed as a vast machine, moving in all its intricate parts in harmony with unchanging and unchangeable laws. It may be added that this so-called mechanistic view of the universe grew in popularity among scientists and skeptics until the opening years of the twentieth century. The essentially godless quality of it was its belief in the constancy of law without a belief in the constancy of a great Lawgiver who is personally planning the destiny of the universe. To discuss the factors which have operated to oppose and today to weaken the popularity of the mechanistic theory would lead us a field from our present theme. Suffice it to say that while rigid mechanism is now at a discount in many circles, the scientific belief in the invariableness of the laws of nature is stronger than ever before.

Now the growth of the idea that nature, through her unchanging laws, is really in charge, played havoc with the doctrine of a directly superintending Providence, as that doctrine was held by all Christian bodies. The Christian view that man is in the hands of God, who offers him salvation against a predetermined day of judgment, had to be abandoned by those who accepted the new views of nature and her laws. There was no longer a closed system, with man's destiny compressed into an earthly cycle of foreordained and limited length, and then world destruction. Man was not in the hands of a great and offended God, who might mercifully work miraculously to save him. Rather, he was on his own, in a world where miracles were declared to he contrary to nature's laws, his destiny dependent wholly on his own resourcefulness, his hope for betterment contingent upon his ability to master obstacles and to square with the laws of nature. And, anyway, he needed no supernatural aid, he needed no salvation, for he was essentially good at heart and needed only improvement. Indeed, the very emphasis on law, to the exclusion of the Lawgiver, increasingly tended to banish the idea of God. That tendency, ever aided by the atheistic bent of certain minds, greatly spread atheism on the Continent, and nurtured deism in England.

Concentration on Present World

The effect of all this was to cause men to concentrate their thoughts on this world, and this world alone, where man, as the captain of his soul and the master of his fate, was to work out his own destiny. No element of finality, such as a day of judgment, was to cut short man's planning for the future. The indefinite years lay ahead. Man had made progress up to this point; why should he not continue to progress? While all who went along with the scientific and skeptical trend did not become godless or atheistic, the inevitable tendency was to minimize, increasingly, the fact and

the significance of God, until He became a vague, faraway, foggy picture. As the significance of God decreased, the apparent importance of man increased. He became the center of everything, and his own endeavors and ingenuity the solution of everything.

The early nineteenth century saw philosophers attempting to formulate the so-called laws of progress, on the theory that "the history of civilization is subject to general laws, or, in other words, that a science of society is possible." - Ibid., p. 307. Foremost in this group was Auguste Conite, a French philosopher, who is credited with having laid the foundations of sociology." - Ibid. Bury thus summarizes Conite's view of history.

"The movement of history is due to the deeply rooted though complex instinct which pushes man to ameliorate his condition incessantly, to develop in all ways the sum of his physical, moral, and intellectual life. And all the phenomena of his social life are closely cohesive, as Saint-Simon had pointed out. By virtue of this cohesion, political, moral, and intellectual progress are inseparable from material progress." - Ibid., p. 293.

As already stated, the doctrine of progress naturally led to the minimizing of God and the glorifying of man. It is no mere coincidence, then, that Conite, who was so prominent in promoting this doctrine, devoted his last years to writing a ponderous work on "social reorganization," which "included a new religion, in which Humanity was the object of worship. "Ibid., p. 307.

Political Movements Reflect New Views

A practical application of this philosophy of progress was the creation of such political movements as socialism, and later, of communism. By organizing the state in harmony with certain ideals of progress, the leaders of such movements naturally believed they could hasten the day of an ideal material world, and then stabilize it at that point. Others who did not endorse state enforced speed toward perfection, but who nevertheless considered progress desirable, began to reveal their views in a school of thought known as liberalism. This term, defined politically, describes the idea that the status quo is not the ideal, that the slow advance of mankind up to the present should be allowed to continue without any hindering laws or customs of former days. Hence liberalism, politically, has been a ferment in modern states, urging the betterment of man's estate by providing him full liberty of opportunity and action, but eschewing state socialism. The term liberalism also has a religious connotation, which will be discussed later.

The nineteenth century, with its increasing developments in the field of discovery and invention, provided another impetus to the idea of progress. The wizardry of science was remaking the world and lifting man to greater comfort. Machinery was taking the place of backbreaking labor, and medical science was winning amazing victories over the ills that have long beset men and sent them to untimely graves. And ever there was the prospect of still greater wonders to be produced. Here was truly something new in the history of the world. If mankind had not already crossed into the land flowing with milk and honey, at least the Jordan had been rolled back as the feet of the scientists touched the waters. Nothing remained but to go in and possess the goodly land. It is easy to see how men could come to confuse scientific progress with the larger idea of

universal progress and the perfectibility of man. Bury thus summarizes this phase of the development of the doctrine:

'The spectacular results of the advance of science and mechanical technique brought home to the mind of the average man the conception of an indefinite increase of man's power over nature as his brain penetrated her secrets. This evident material progress which has continued incessantly ever since has been the mainstay of the general belief in Progress which is prevalent to-day." - Ibid., pp. 324,325.

Evolution Theory Provides Capstone

The capstone to the doctrine of progress and the perfectibility of man was placed by Darwin in 1859, when he published his epochal work Origin of Species. Before his time the idea of evolution had been held largely as a philosophical speculation, though some evidence in the scientific world had been alleged in support of it. Darwin set forth his theory as the key to unlock man's long history and to unfold his vast future. In The Descent of Man Darwin explored more fully the subject of evolution in relation to man, coming to this statement in the closing paragraph:

"Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of' his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future." - Page 707.

Evolution Principle Widely Applied

Spencer was the great philosopher of evolution, even as Huxley was its militant exponent in the arena of controversy. Spencer sought to apply the principle of evolution to all realms of life, in an attempt to prove that socially and ethically, as well as biologically, man's course is upward and onward. He had held these ideas some years before Darwin published his Origin of Species. Darwin's work came at the psychological moment to provide Spencer with apparent scientific support for his philosophical views. Bury declares:

"The receptive attitude of the public towards such a philosophy as Spencer's had been made possible by Darwin's discoveries, which were reinforced by the growing science of paleontology (the study of fossil organisms] and the accumulating material evidence of the great antiquity of man. By the simultaneous advances of geology and biology man's perspective in time was revolutionized, just as the Copernican astronomy had revolutionized his perspective in space. Many thoughtful and many thoughtless people were ready to discern-as Huxley suggested-in man's 'long progress through the past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future.'" - The Idea of Progress, p. 342.

We need not here turn aside to discuss the fact that the theory of evolution, strictly speaking, can be used as art argument for pessimism in regard to man's future. For example, sonic philosophers have pointed to the increasingly complex life of highly civilized people as entailing troubles and distresses unknown to the simple savage. This is a restatement of the position of Rousseau, who long before had promoted the idea of the inherent goodness of man and the inherent badness of

civilization. Bury quotes Huxley as expressing in his later years no very hopeful views as to the future of man, if even the best of modern civilization is any measure of man's development. Then Bury adds:

"I have quoted these views to illustrate that evolution lends itself to a pessimistic as well as to air optimistic interpretation. The question whether it leads in a desirable direction or not is answered according to the temperament of the inquirer. In an age of prosperity and self complacency the affirmative answer was readily received, and the term evolution attracted to itself in common speech the implications of value which belong to Progress." - Ibid., p. 345.

Integral Part of Modern Thought

Thus has the idea of progress become a part of the thinking of modern man, a "general article of faith." Nowhere in his remarkable book, The Idea of Progress, does Bury reveal that he believes the idea has been proved true. He observes that in our day "indefinite Progress is generally assumed as an axiom" by all those who write on social science, but that the "law" governing it "remains still undiscovered." He places the word law in quotation marks to indicate, evidently, that he is not certain whether there is such a law. He even thinks that this dogma may be superseded someday by another theory of man's destiny. 15 But the point of interest to us is that the idea of progress became dogma for modern man. We close this survey of the secular factors that contributed to the adoption of the idea, with these words front the final paragraph of Bury's work:

"Looking back on the course of the inquiry, we note how the history of the idea has been connected with the growth of modern science, with the growth of rationalism, and with the struggle for political and religious liberty. ... The idea took definite shape in France when the old scheme of the universe had been shattered by the victory of the new astronomy and the prestige of Providence ... was paling before the majesty of the immutable laws of nature. There began a slow but steady reinstatement of the kingdom of this world. The otherworldly dreams of theologians, ... which had ruled so long lost their power, and men's earthly home again insinuated itself into their affections, but with the new hope of its becoming a place fit for reasonable beings to live in. We have seen how the belief that our race is travelling towards earthly happiness was propagated by some eminent thinkers, as well as by some 'not very fortunate persons who had a good deal of time on their hands.' And all these high-priests and incense-bearers to whom the creed owes its success were rationalists." - Ibid., pp. 348,349.

Modem Paganism

The ancient pagans believed that this world was the one place on which to fasten their interests and in which to find such happiness as might be obtainable. Whether this was a good world or not, they did not know; they only knew that it was the best and only world of which they could be sure. Hence the dictum: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. The rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries skeptics, agnostics, deists, atheists-who were the developers of the idea of progress, simply turned men back again to this earth. They did so by undermining the Christian doctrines of Providence and heaven, and by picturing our world as a place that is in process of steadily becoming a more ideal abode.

The nineteenth century poet Swinbume shockingly reveals in the following sacrilegious lines how belief in the potentialities of material progress had in it a pagan, godless quality:

"Thou art smitten, Thou God, Thou art smitten; Thy death is upon thee, 0 Lord. And the love- song of earth as Thy death resounds through the winds of her wings" Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things."

From this summary of secular causes that produced the earthbound idea of progress and man's perfectibility, let us turn to consider a theological idea that has gained ascendancy in the last two centuries, paralleling and reinforcing the secular idea of progress. It is the doctrine of a temporal millennium, introduced into Protestant prophetic thinking by Daniel Whitby, an Anglican divine, in 1703. He set forth the view that the thousand years of Revelation 20 is to precede the Second Advent of Christ. During this millennium the nations will learn righteousness, the Jews will return to their own land and be converted, and all will be bliss. The resurrection that the Bible declares will take place at the beginning of the millennium, he spiritualized away, making it a spiritual resurrection of men dead in trespasses and sin. The outpouring of the Divine Spirit is to produce a kind of spiritual Second Coming of Christ. He is to come to this earth in spirit to abide in the hearts of men. Thus the Christian should look forward, not to a cataclysmic climax of a sinful world, but to a gradually improving society in a slowly but surely developing new heavens and a new earth freed of all sin.

Paralleling of Two Theories

Here is a theological theory of the future of man parallel to that set forth by the rationalists. The difference is in the means by which world betterment will be brought about. How one theory may have affected the other, there is no way of telling. But this much we know, that theories, the same as men, do not live in a vacuum; they live in an interacting society. Here were two theories, having an essential point in common-that the world is headed toward improvement. The exponents of one theory of progress could hardly fail to be aided by the exponents of the other. And in the minds of many people the two theories could easily tend to blend.

This postmillennial theory made rapid headway in theological circles, so that by early nineteenth century it was quite generally accepted by Protestants. When Miller and the other Advent preachers began to stir men with their preaching of a premillenial, literal coming of Christ, theological opposition was chiefly built on the contention that world improvement, not world destruction, lay just ahead. As already quoted, the Reverend George Bush, in one of a series of letters to Miller, declared:

"The great event before the world is not its physical conflagration, but its moral regeneration....

"This is the common and prevailing belief of Christendom, and I have no doubt the true one." - Reasons for Rejecting Mr. Miller's View on the Advent, Second Advent Library, no. 44, pp. 11, 12.

Bush was correct in declaring that this was the common and prevailing belief in Christendom. An examination of religious works published at that time amply supports his statement. For

example, the Baptist author and preacher, John Dowling, who was a most active opponent of Millerism, wrote in a much-quoted work that was intended to expose Miller's Advent teachings:

"The doctrine I hold in relation to the millennium, and for which I think I am indebted to the Bible, is-That the reign of Christ on earth will not be a personal but a spiritual reign. That it will be preceded by the overthrow of Popery, Mahomedanism, Paganism, and all false systems. That it will consist in the universal prevalence of righteousness and true holiness, throughout the whole world; ... that this glorious age shall pass away and be succeeded by a brief but dreadful period of wickedness [when Satan is loosed for a little time]. After which the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from Heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ." - An Exposition of the Prophecies, pp. 167, 168.

New View Anchored to Bible at First

Though Whitby and the theologians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who accepted his postmillennial doctrine, drew a wrong belief from the Scriptures, they were nevertheless firm believers in the Bible. They did not even attempt to spiritualize away the whole doctrine of the Advent. They believed in a literal coming of a personal Lord and Savior from heaven. Their error lay in placing this event at the wrong end of the thousand-year period and in declaring that during this period the world would he converted to Christ. They taught a false doctrine of world betterment that outdid even the rationalist picture of improvement, but they did it within the framework of a divinely ordained plan and with an actual, supernatural Advent of Christ as the ultimate climax.

By the opening of the twentieth century the doctrine was undergoing a significant change. Christendom quite generally continued to believe, and perhaps more ardently than ever, that the world was headed toward holiness and that the temporal millennium was not far away. But beyond that point the doctrine had become confused and blurred. The whole idea of the Advent had become spiritualized so that no clear teaching was set forth regarding events at the close of the millennium. Indeed, the very word millennium itself had rather become synonymous with a vague, indefinite period of time. In short, the supernatural aspects of the doctrine were quite drained out. The result was that the belief in world betterment, as the theologians set it forth, became not too sharply distinguished from the doctrine as set forth by secular philosophers and reformers.

And why had this come about? The answer is found in a trend that developed, late in the nineteenth century, in Christendom. When crystallized, this trend became a definite and finally a controlling school of thought known as Modernism, or Liberalism. The way was prepared for this by the acceptance on the part of an ever-increasing number of clergy, of the higher critical view of the Bible. In brief, this view is that the Bible is not uniquely inspired. Further, that it is largely a work of uncertain authorship, much later in composition than originally believed to be, which fades from the historical to the mythical in its earlier portions, particularly the books of Moses. This view obviously robbed the Bible of most of its divine authority. Certainly the believer in this view discovered shortly that he no longer stood on the historic Protestant platform of the supreme authority of the Bible. Instead, he found himself setting up reason as a

judge of inspiration. With that transition made, almost anything could follow in the way of change in theological beliefs. And very much did follow, and almost immediately.

Modernism Defined

As already noted, by the end of the nineteenth century the public was dazzled with the accomplishments of the scientists, who declared that they were discovering the true keys to the universe. It would have been strange, indeed, if there had not developed in the church a desire to revamp ancient beliefs to modern discoveries. That desire, expressed through those who had imbibed higher critical teachings, is what produced Modernism, or Liberalism. Probably there is no simpler way to describe theological liberalism than as a movement within the church which seeks to make religion appear intellectually respectable by adjusting it to scientific teachings.

Now, the first precept of the scientific world is the unqualified invariability of natural law. But the acceptance of that precept by theologians meant the abandonment of belief in miracles. Science has no room for miracles. The elimination of miracles from the Bible robbed it of its uniqueness and power. The wondrous things of Scripture had to be explained on naturalistic grounds. The record of Christ's life on earth began to look very different when read through Modernist spectacles.

Man Increases, God Decreases

The major scientific pronouncement of the late nineteenth century, the evolution theory, was being exploited in secular circles as a master law governing all aspects of life. Modernism sought to harmonize the Bible with this theory. The result was that the opening chapters of Genesis were explained away as poetry, allegory, or plain myth, depending on the mood of the explainer. Genesis presents a picture of perfection at the beginning, followed by the introduction of sin and the fall, from which man can be lifted up only through the redemptive death of Christ. Therefore the Modernists, in harmonizing Genesis with science, quite completely changed their view of man. They saw him as the end result of a slow evolution upward. His undesirable qualities, hitherto attributed to sin, became simply the remnants of his brute ancestry. Furthermore, if man has made this much progress upward, why not believe that he will continue to progress toward perfection? Thus churchmen were traveling the same path in their reasoning as the rationalists had already traveled.

This idea of man's perfectibility, coupled with an acceptance of the dominance of natural law, led on logically to the idea of the increasing importance of man and the decreasing importance of God. In theological minds, even as in scientific, the classic idea of a personal God definitely and directly controlling the affairs of the universe began to fade rapidly. Now if God as a personality fades, to what can man turn? The answer is, he can turn back on himself. He can worship man.

Skeptical onlookers and some so-called advanced thinkers in Modernist circles were quick to point out that Humanism as the worship of man is known-was the logical end of the Modernist road. And indeed to that very end came the extreme wing of Modernism in the 1920's. This was the high-water mark of the doctrine of inevitable progress for man as developed through theological channels.

A logical corollary of this whole Modernist adjustment of religion to science was the "social gospel," which began to be actively preached near the opening of the twentieth century. The pioneers of this preaching declared that their endeavor was to apply the principles of Christianity to social conditions, in the confident hope that the kingdom of God could be set up in this world.

Thus the church began to nurture a social reform movement, which though springing from a different source than socialism or political liberalism, had a not dissimilar goal in view-the creating of an ideal present world for man. However, as Modernist churchmen became increasingly earth bound in their thinking, some even moving into Humanism, the social gospel began to sound strangely like the secular doctrine of social reform. Not infrequently Modernist ministers openly allied themselves with left-wing secular reformers, feeling that they had a common goal in their reform program. This was natural if not inevitable.

Liberalism Tums to the Left

With the supernatural quite drained out of their theology, young Modernist preachers took hold of the social gospel of a gradually idealized present world as the only gospel that really made sense for them. They could no longer preach the classic doctrine of a sure and certain heavenly home, either premillenial or postmillennial in time. From force of early training, a Modernism that finally skirted the shores of Humanism may have originally steered its bark by studying the heavens, but it soon took to determining its course by observing the earthly torches of secular philosophers and reformers, especially those lights visible from the larboard side.

It may willingly be admitted that the social gospel has been preached in sincerity by high-minded men, and that the beautiful ideals of Christ have colored the arguments for earthly reforms, without minimizing any feature of the analysis just made. The one point to be made clear is this, that the idea of earthly progress leading toward perfection developed in our modern period until, by the opening of the twentieth century, it had become a dominant belief among secularists and liberal churchmen.

Plausible Claims of World Progress

Indeed, as the world entered the present century, these secularists, and even more so the liberal religionists, were ready to proclaim that all history, especially the history of the Christian Era, supported their boast of progress. They contrasted the present with the early centuries of the era, declaring that the Roman Empire provided a picture of decadence and dissipation never exceeded, and perhaps never equaled, in succeeding centuries. They contrasted the enlightened present with the Dark Ages, when an apostate Christianity committed millions of martyrs to the stake. Yes, and these believers in inevitable progress were particularly interested in contrasting the present with the world of the last few centuries. They pointed to the frightful squalor and lawlessness that plagued London and in lesser degree other great English cities within the last two hundred years, to say nothing of the immorality that flourished in the English court in the seventeenth century. They cited the dissoluteness of the court of Louis XIV, and the wretched condition of the populace that produced the French Revolution. They even pointed to America supposedly free from much of Europe's ills and vices, and showed that this land was formerly plagued with religious riots, including burning of churches and murder, with fatal dueling, with

slave markets, and with drunkenness that was so widespread that it produced, in reaction, the temperance movement of the early nineteenth century.

All this and more the believers in world progress were presenting as proof that the world by AD. 1900 had made great advancement. They might have been embarrassed that the progress, socially and morally, had really gotten under way only recently, but they explained this on the ground that man's possibilities of perfection awaited the improvement of the environment. And was it not in the latter part of the nineteenth century that most of the social, hygienic, and educational legislation had been enacted?

Thus both secularists and liberal religionists reasoned and exulted as they entered the twentieth century. They had no time for the Adventist minister who declared that the "whole world lies in wickedness" and that God's judgments upon this evil world were soon to descend.

Note:- As stated at the beginning of this chapter, Bury has been followed in the main outlines of the sketch of the growth of the secular idea of progress. His viewpoint seems to be well supported. But no aspect of history is treated uniformly by historians, to say nothing of other writers who may deal with the matter. This is true regarding the history of the idea of progress. The chief difference in view as to the forces that operated to produce secularism and the theory of man's inherent worth, has to do with the part played by the Protestant Reformation.

Catholic writers, and some others, contend that Protestantism is chiefly responsible for the modern secularistic era and the erroneous idea of man's worth. This contention is quite invalid. What the Protestant Reformation did, among other things, was to break the authority of the Catholic Church over men's minds and to substitute another authority, the Bible. When the church no longer controlled men's thinking, a fraction of Europe's population turned to the Bible, the remainder responded favorably to the new voices of skeptics who were appealing to reason as the only authority for men's lives. Luther and other Reformers warned of the dangers of reason and appealed to men to turn to the Scriptures. But the Reformers, though they held on to some of the evil ideas of church and state union, never called upon the state to hold men to the church to the degree that Catholicism had done. The inevitable result was that men who formerly from fear had failed to reveal their skeptical views now began to let those views be widely known. Only in this sense may it be said that Protestantism contributed to the secularistic trend of post-medieval days. But to admit this is to bring no indictment of Protestantism; it is simply to admit that the granting of liberty of thought involves giving men the liberty to think wrongly if they desire to.

The reader who wishes to pursue further the subject of the history of the idea of progress is referred to the following works, which make significant reference to the matter.

J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress. The Macmillan Company, 1932.
John Herman Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1940. Carl F. H. Henry, Remaking the Modern Mind. Wm. B. Eerdman's Publishing Company, 1946. Arnold S. Nash, The University and the Modern World. The Macmillan Company, 1944.
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History. Oxford Press, 1946.
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945.

14. Collapse of the Idea of World Progress

S0 Strong was the idea of progress, so fully had it become an article of faith in the creed of all classes of people, that even the shadows of impending world war in 1914 did not darken the faith. We see what we wish to see, and men everywhere wished only to see proofs of progress. The mere thought of war between civilized nations was ridiculed, even as late as the spring of 1914.

So tenacious was the idea of progress that it actually maintained the control of men's minds through the four years of war. And by an easy rationalization! We are waging a war to make the world safe for democracy! It is truly unfortunate that we must engage in so horrible a strife, but it is a war to end war! Like the fabled phoenix, a new world will arise from the ashes of the old, purged of the evils of the past in the purifying fires of the great conflict! A League of Nations will make sure the brotherhood of man, and all will be well!

Here applies the cynical observation, generally attributed to Benjamin Franklin, that man is fortunately a rational being, and thus he is able to provide reasonable proofs for whatever he wishes to believe or to do. Surely a faith that was strong enough to remove a mountain of world war out of the path of the idea of progress was no mean faith!

Peace Pacts Strengthen Idea of Progress

The will to believe that the world war of 1914-18 was only a purging fire and not a destroyer of world progress, was further strengthened by a series of peace pacts that were signed in the next decade. At Genoa, in 1922, some thirty nations adopted a resolution against engaging in war one with another. At Geneva, in 1924, the assembly of the League of Nations drew up a pact binding the League members to arbitration in the settlement of controversies. At Locarno, in 1925, France, Germany, and Belgium made a compact never to make war on one another, but to resort to arbitration. At Havana, in 1927, the Pan-American Congress adopted an antiwar resolution. And as a climax came the Pact of Paris, or the Kellogg-Briand Pact, so named from the initiators of it-America's Secretary of State, Frank B. Kellogg, and France's Premier, Aristide Briand. This pact called on the signatories to outlaw war "as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another," and to agree that "the solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means." This is the essence of the two short but sweeping articles that constitute the treaty.

This treaty to outlaw war was signed originally by the representatives of fifteen principal nations (and later by almost every civilized country) amid the tumultuous acclaim of the secular and religious press. The editor of Good Housekeeping described Secretary Kellogg as "the Man Who Ended War," and declared: "For the first time in the history of the world, world-wide and everlasting peace is to be had, if not exactly for the asking, at least by fighting for it before our treaty-ratifying bodies.". - September, 1928.

The High Point of Hope and Confidence

The editor of The Christian Century, who attended the treaty signing ceremonies in Paris and wrote an eyewitness account, penned these glowing words:

"One staggers at the attempt to set forth the significance of the doings of this day. But again, the deed cannot be doubted. I saw it done. I heard the words spoken. I looked for an hour into the grave faces of the men who were empowered to sign. I handled the finished pact. I read anew the unambiguous words of renunciation. I looked at the signatures and seals. And I cannot do otherwise than command my pen to write these words:

"'Today international war was banished from civilization.' "Then on prudent second thought he added:

"If this pact does not end war, it would be better for humanity had it never been signed. ... Never did the spirit of man undertake a risk so great. It must mean a new world, a world of permanent peace on the basis of justice. And if it does not mean that, it will mean nothing less than a new epic of the fall of man." - The Christian Century, Sept. 6, 1928.

A fair interpretation of the widespread comment, of which the two cited are typical, permits the conclusion that the idea of world progress had not only survived the war but bid fair to flourish more abundantly than ever, under the protecting banner of universal peace. Traveling with increasing momentum for two centuries, this humanly satisfying doctrine of progress had surmounted the first great obstacle in its path, and now who would be so foolhardy as to challenge the truth of it? Had not the nations laid aside forever the weapons of war!

The Old Order Begins to Change

But the war had shaken the structure of the world much more completely than even the most sagacious of men seemed to realize. New forces had been let loose. The old order was breaking up. The truth of this began to dawn on men when the world sank into an appalling economic depression in the early 1930's. The material good things of life were disappearing on every side, and in many instances destitution and chill penury were taking their place. The grisly side of life came increasingly to the surface. Men in all lands grew restless. The League of Nations had failed to live up to the hopes reposed in it. That failure stood out sharply against the background of economic darkness that had settled over the earth. Political and idealistic failure might be ignored if creature comforts abounded, but not if they departed. Nor had the depression more than spread its heavy pall before strange sounds were heard in the darkness, strident voices calling for new nationalistic ardor, and the clangor of armament factories. For the roots of World War II run back at least to the early 1930's, if not to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

As early as the spring of 1933 a prominent religious editor, Paul Hutchinson, in discussing the forces currently operating on the church and on society at large, could make this sweeping statement of belief:

"Here, then, is my credo: 1 believe that we are living in a. day which sees the final destruction of the illusion of inevitable progress which Herbert Spencer and the Victorian evolutionists fastened upon the prewar liberalism of the West. Even in America, where adventitious aids made a cloudless optimism seem reasonable as long after the World War as the campaign speeches of

Mr. Hoover in 1928, man now finds himself confronting the possibility of chaos quite as much as of triumph, and discovering that catastrophe is much closer than either a dependable peace or a just, and therefore stable, world order." The Forum, April, 1933.

A Liberal Challenges Liberalism

Even before 1933 warning notes were sounding in church circles regarding the false heaven in which men were living. In the spring of 1931 a leading Modernist spokesman declared, in an article entitled "Let Liberal Churches Stop Fooling Themselves":

"Liberal religion has a dogma and it views the contemporary world through the eyes of this dogma. The dogma is all the more potent in coloring opinion because it is not known as a dogma. The dogma is that the world is gradually growing better and that the inevitability of gradualness guarantees our salvation. ...

"The real fact about our civilization is that it is flirting with disaster. ...

'Meanwhile the church lives in a comfortable world. It sees the sorry state of our civilization and yet it does not see. We can see only what our dogmas and preconceptions permit us to see. ...

"The romanticism of the liberal church is revealed not only in its view of history but in its estimate of man. It holds, on the whole, to a Rousseau-istic view of human virtue. It has made an easy identification of this view with the Christian estimate of man as the child of God. The result is that it fails to understand the diabolical aspects of human life." - Reinhold Neibuhr, The Christian Century, March 25, 1931.

How One Man's Mind Changed

Niebuhr, who has just been quoted, is unquestionably one of the most challenging figure in the contemporary religious world. The transitions in his own thinking give us an insight into the changing viewpoint of multitudes of Liberals who had been offering incense at the shrine of world progress. From a Detroit pastorate he came, in 1928, to a professorship in Union Theological Seminary, New York, easily the most prominent Modernist seminary in the United States. As a pastor he had been an ardent preacher of the social gospel. In New York, he actively gave his support to what would be described as left-wing reforms. He even ran on the socialist ticket and for a time was editor of a socialist paper. All this was incidental, of course, to his seminary teaching. In 1932 Niebuhr published a book entitled Moral Man and Immoral Society, and followed this, early in 1934, with another volume, Reflections on the End of an Era, Commenting, in 1935, on these two works, Paul Hutchinson declares:

"The two [books] have rocked Protestant church life. ... There is no other current religious thought which has made the thought and effort of the last hundred years appear so structurally futile ... "Niebuhr's very titles will suggest the direction in which his mind has traveled. He started with civilization in need of some process of cleansing-that is to say, religious socialism. Then he became oppressed with a sense of the ineradicable tendency to evil in society, so he attempted to drive a line between man who, as individual, is a pretty good chap, quite promising as a candidate for salvation, and man who, as a member of a group, is an irredeemable

savage-'moral man and immoral society.' But it took him less than two years to discover that such a distinction would not stand the test, so that now we hear his voice of doom at 'the end of an era,' declaring that man is quite as immoral as the society in which he herds." - Scribner's Magazine, October, 1935.

In the year 1939 there appeared in The Christian Century, most representative of nondenominational journals in America, a series of articles entitled "How My Mind Has Changed in This Decade." Each article in the series of thirty-four was written by a different religious leader. The editor observed:

"We believe that there has been coming, in the past decade, a radical and significant change in the thinking of Christian scholarship and leadership. For many this change is 4n process; ... but all of us are aware that ours is a period of intensive and profound transition. There is naturally much bewilderment. Many Christian people are walking as if in a kind of mist" - The Christian Century, October 4,1939.

Vast Changes in Decade

He asks the question, "Why was the past ten-year period taken as particularly significant?" and answers it thus:

"The answer is that it was in this period that a whole new theological outlook had emerged. The liberalism which had been for nearly a half-century the common presupposition of Christian scholarship had been for the first time effectively challenged in this decade. The earlier inferences which had been drawn from the higher criticism of the Bible had come under critical review. The New Testament presented itself in a new aspect, calling for a radical revision of the prevailing liberal conception of the origin of Christianity. It was in this decade that the optimism which had been associated with the doctrine of evolution was challenged as superficial and unwarranted. A halt had been called to the progressive capitulation of theology to the categories and presuppositions of science. The culture of Western civilization was under fire as based upon a philosophy which was now declared false.

"All this was a post-world war development. It issued from springs which began flowing in the first decade after the war, and were at first regarded as mere sporadic signs of reaction due to European chaos and despair. In the second post-war decade, however, this development assumed formidable proportions as a highly sophisticated attack on the foundations of liberal theology, and the hitherto dominant liberalism was put on the defensive." - Ibid.

Most of the thirty-four contributors to The Christian Century series expressed some degree of change of belief. The confident Liberalism of a former day is 'gone. The dogmatism is largely missing. Perhaps most marked is the rediscovery by many of these men of the perversity of the human heart. Sin, a term almost outmoded by Liberals for a generation, has come back into their vocabularies as describing a grim and grisly reality. Gone is the foolish notion that material advance implies also moral advance. Probably the most vigorous in expressing his viewpoint is Reinhold Niebuhr, whose earlier views have already been quoted. His contribution to the symposium is entitled "Ten Years That Shook My World," and contains this withering indictment of Liberalism:

"Liberal Christianity, in short, tended to follow modern culture in estimating both the stature and the virtue of man. It did not recognize that man is a spirit who can find a home neither in nature nor in reason, but only in God....

"For this reason, the simple reinterpretation of the Kingdom of God into the law of progress, in the thought of liberal Christianity, is an equally serious betrayal of essential insights of the Christian faith to the prejudices of modern culture. Obviously there is progress of all kinds in human history, including progress in aerial bombing and the effective use of the radio for the dissemination of political lies. There is progress from immaturity to maturity in every field of endeavor. But there is not a single bit of evidence to prove that good triumphs over evil in this constant development of history. History points to a goal beyond itself, and not merely to an eternity which negates history." - The Christian Century, April 26, 1939. 16

A little later, Harry Emerson Fosdick, widely quoted Modernist preacher, wrote a book entitled Living Under Tension. The Second World War had already begun, with Liberalism as one of its victims. Fosdick set off the tragedy of our time against the bright hopes that controlled men in earlier years. Said he: "Every path that man is traveling today leads to the rediscovery of sin." He contrasts the hopes once placed in scientific inventions with the deadly war uses to which they are put. He reminds us of the confidence once placed in education: "A century ago in Boston, Horace Mann [crusader for universal common school education] believed that crime could be practically eliminated in this country by increase in the size and number of our tax supported schools."

"High Intelligence and Low Desire"

Fosdick sorrowfully observes that today we have "a combination of high intelligence and low desires." He exclaims: "How easily some people have supposed that the human problem could be solved!" And immediately gives these two illustrations:

"In 1893 Hiram Maxim, speaking of his new and terrible gun, said: 'It will make war impossible.' That is all he knew about human nature. In 1892 Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, said that his new dynamite factories might end war sooner than peace congresses. That is all he knew about human nature. This incomprehensible monster, man, has it in him to use for wholesale destruction things a thousand times worse than dynamite and Maxim guns."

Fosdick sums up the whole matter by saying that there has been "a radical failure to see that there is something wrong in human nature itself," and that something is what earlier theologians called "original sin." (Excerpts published in The Christian Advocate, March 19, 1942, under the title "Today's Rediscovery of Sin.")

The ever-enlarging and ever-more-terrifying Second World War brought still more admissions of disillusionment from the religious Liberals who had stood at the forefront in proclaiming the doctrine of a hopeful, sunny future. And let it be remembered in this connection that while the idea of progress was first promoted by confessedly godless skeptics, that idea was taken over and preached by Liberal ministers with a new and authoritative fervor that quite outdid the rationalists. Hence the decline of the idea in religious circles is more significant than its decline in secular ranks.

In the summer of 1945 we find Daniel Day Williams, of the Chicago Theological Seminary, writing these confessional lines:

"Today the world wears an aspect which it did not have for most men of the nineteenth century. We who thought of ourselves as men of good will creating a peaceful world are once more in the holocaust of war. ...

"The change is not only in the outward situation but in the inward spirit of the contemporary man. Something like an unmasking of our human nature has taken place. We have thought of ourselves as men of good will building the good society. But was this not the conventional cloak for our real lack of love? Are we quite sure we can distinguish in ourselves that which is truly the spirit of unselfish giving from that which is merely the covert disguise of self-centeredness? ...

"How, then, can we think of the world as the subject of God's redemption? For the answer to this question contemporary theology is turning back to the Reformation doctrine that this world as we now experience it is alienated from its true source and destiny. A fundamental wrongness has entered the world in the form of sin." - The Journal of Religion, July, 1945.

Williams admits that the basic concepts of Liberalism must be greatly revised, but he still feels that something can be done to improve our world within modest limits. Says he:

"There are, indeed, limits to the possible transformation of the world. The sober language of Christian realism will not forget the vast mystery of evil and death. It will confess the resistance to God's way in the soul of man. But no real good can come in history unless men are willing to do what they can with human problems. Hopelessness produces helplessness." - Ibid.

The Primary Liberal Premise Deserted

What a chastened and subdued Liberalism those sentences reveal! A few years ago such a declaration would have been considered, for what it really is, a clear-cut desertion from the basic belief that has distinguished Liberalism, the belief in the inevitable and glorious advance of man both morally and materially in this very present world.

Willard L. Sperry, formerly dean of the Harvard Divinity School, writing at the close of the second world war, observes how the first world war did not "affect our native optimism adversely," that this optimism began to crack with the great depression of 1929 and the events that followed after. Then he adds:

"Nothing was farther from the thought of those of us who were already launched into our ministry before 1914 than that we should ever live to see any such event of the dimensions of the First World War, let alone two such wars. For us, let us say in the year 1910, great wars were things of the past, all fought and finished long before. We read about them in a famous book, which had been in every boy's library, called Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World.

- Therefore there was good warrant for devoting ourselves to the task of perfecting the social order as rapidly as possible....

"Organized Christianity was wholly unprepared for the event [of two world wars], not merely because it was hopelessly divided and thus unable to speak with a single voice, but because it had not regarded any such eventuality as within the realm of historical probability." - Christendom, Spring, 1946.

Secularists Make Confession

The shock and disillusionment of two world wars, while greatest for Liberal theologians, who had buttressed their hopes of world progress with the apparent sanctions of the Christian religion, has been very great for non-churchmen as well. Leaders of thought in every realm of life have been quite completely disenchanted. Their social planning, their confidence in the inherent qualities of man, who needs only a decent chance and a good environment in order to blossom out to perfection-all this has proved to be unfounded.

Nicholas Murray Butler made the following confession in a closing paragraph of his 1944 report as president of Columbia University:

"The history of the world's religion, philosophy, literature and science records wisdom on the highest plane and of most convincing character. Yet it is that wisdom which has shown itself unable to control the conduct of mankind. Fundamentally, the ruling force is conduct, whether that conduct be moral or immoral. If moral, there is hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but increasing and complete destruction of all that has been accomplished for civilization during the past five thousand years." - Columbia University, Bulletin of Information, Forty Fifth Series, no. 5, Dec. 30,1944, p. 52.

A University of Toronto lecturer on political economy, Arnold S. Nash, makes this general statement as to the collapse of Liberalist tenets:

"According to liberalism man is fundamentally good and his inherent goodness is indicated in his increasing capacity, by using his intelligence, to solve all the problems that come his way. Such is the. basis of the liberal belief in progress-the dogma that man, like the world itself, is slowly getting better so that history becomes a progressive realization of man's ideals as defects in social and economic organization are remedied and education becomes more widespread.

"Such are the essential outlines of the faith of the typical university teacher of our era in the liberal democratic countries. It is this faith which is now [1943] being shaken far more rudely by events than it ever could be by argument. The tragic happenings of the last few years have indicated not only failure of man as man but in particular the failure of thinking man." - The University and the Modern World, pp. 30,3

The Trouble is with Man Himself

An editorial in a learned quarterly well reveals the changed feeling and the disillusionment of secular thinkers produced by World War II. Commenting on "the starvation camps like Belsen and Buchenwald and the annihilation camps like Maidenek," the editor observes:

"It is not science that has destroyed the world, despite all the gloomy forebodings of the earlier prophets. It is man who has destroyed man. He has destroyed him face to face, with forethought and without pity. And he has not needed the newest weapons of science. He has used the oldest weapons of hunger and the bludgeon and fire.

"This will be a blow to the artist and the social thinker. "The basic assumption of twentieth- century social theory has been that mankind is caught in a tragic paradox: that man's brain creates the things his will cannot control. This has been proved true by the event. But what we must now add to it is that man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart. And we must add that man's heart has proved to be a soil in which it is possible for evil to flower.

"We are the fortunate survivors who are able to witness the crumbling of the fascist house of death. But we must not allow ourselves to forget that the men who built this house of death were also men, Their impulses were our impulses, their instinctive endowments ours, their biological inheritance ours, their historical memories ours. ...

"The axis of interest will now have to shift to man himself and, his essential nature." - The American Scholar, Summer, 1945.

What might have been left of the doctrine of inevitable progress and the perfectibility of man was finally blasted by the atomic bomb, which not only shook the earth, but also the minds of men in a way they had never been shaken before. In comment on tile bomb, Raynlond B. Fosclick, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, observes:

"As modern man looks in the mirror today, the reflected image is not what he has imagined himself to be. We are apparently closer to barbarism than we fondly believed. The idea of automatic progress, the upward and onward march of the race-seems curiously unreal in the light of what we have done in these last years.

"We are called upon to deal not only with the explosive power of the atomic bomb but with the equally explosive energy of human personality, and that energy can be just as devastating if released in the wrong direction. It is not the weapon so much as it is the human beings who may wish to use it that constitute the real danger....

"Modern man-the end product of all the humanizing influences of sixty centuries-thus comes to the end of this war. And in the looking glass we seem to see the image, not of a being grown kindly and tolerant with the years, but of one whose primitive emotions lie just below the surface. And who is easily capable of discarding the principles wrought out on Sinai and the Areopagus whenever they stand in his way. J. A. Hobson's characterization of twentieth-century man appears at first glance not too inaccurate: 'A naked Polynesian, parading in top hat and spats."'-The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 30,1945.

Writing in similar vein, a psychologist thus points to the real cause of terror in the Atomic Age:

'Perhaps the reason why man becomes. terrified at the ominous possibilities of releasing atomic energy, is that he has so recently been confronted by the fact that there are forces just as powerful

and as dangerous locked tip within himself." - Grace R. Foster in The American Scholar, Summer, 1946.

The editor of The Christian Century, writing under the title "The Atomic Bomb and the Christian Faith," in this way sums up the chief significance of atomic energy for the Christian church:

"We are thus brought to the final test under which Christianity must prove itself equal to discharge its religious responsibility in a world community; namely, it must be able to do something radical about man. We are told by the scientists that the possible destroyer of the earth as the habitation of man is none other than man himself. ... Science thus throws the whole question raised by the atomic bomb into the lap of the Christian faith. Something radical must be done about man.

"When we talk about the nature of man, we are standing on ground that has been pre-empted by Christianity. On this ground, science and Christianity now meet face to face. With one voice they declare that the future is precarious and with one voice they declare that it is precarious because of man. Christianity puts its finger upon that in man's nature which science now gravely fears may cause his destruction and the destruction of the earth with him. Science and Christianity are now looking at the same thing in man. Science has no word for it, but Christianity has. That word is sin.' - March 13, 1946.

And now, as if two world wars, capped by the explosive discovery of the atomic bomb, were not enough, we hear dread forecasts of a greater horror, the hydrogen bomb. Though hidden behind a veil of secrecy, enough is known about the hydrogen bomb to indicate that it is a fearful advance over the atomic bomb.

Confessions of Atomic Scientists

At the close of the second world war a group of nuclear physicists, realizing the potential destruction that resided in the product of their brains and hands, banded themselves into a society with a view to promoting plans for the control of atomic energy. They lectured to service clubs and other groups. They founded a journal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in which they sought further to set forth the need of controls. How poorly they succeeded in their endeavors they confess in a most revealing editorial in the January, 1951, issue of the Bulletin. The editor recounts the educational activities of the scientists during the preceding five years, and remarks: "Scientists-- whose profession requires a recognition of facts. however unpleasant cannot but admit the fact that their campaign has failed." This leads him to raise the morbid and self- answering question: "What then have we to show for five years of effort, except the relief of having 'spoken and saved our souls' and the doubtful satisfaction of having been right in our gloomy predictions?"

Into the crooked and suffocating confines of this question mark may now be compressed what remains of the glory and grandeur of a world that formerly thought it needed only the operation of a law of progress, directed by the brains of scientists, to build a heaven on earth! Well has someone observed that the real problem before us today is not the new atom but the old Adam!

In the light of all this testimony, and much more that might be offered, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the doctrine of world progress is bankrupt today. To sum up-there were two pillars on which the doctrine was reared:

1. That man is inherently good or at least that he has infinite potentialities of goodness, and that he needs only better education, better environment, and better opportunities in order to bring out the best in him and cause him to slough off any remaining taint of brute inheritance.

2. That there is a deep-moving and all-pervasive law of progress that leads the whole creation onward and upward, which law finds its best scientific proof in the theory of evolution, and its best practical demonstration in the marvelous developments of the modern scientific age.

Two Pillars of Doctrine Collapse

These two pillars that so long upheld the imposing edifice of world progress have today fallen as surely as if a modern Samson had encircled them. The figure is apt. Ancient Samson was apparently under complete control, blinded and chained by his captors, who reveled in the thought that no longer would their lives be insecure. The Samson of war, boasted modern man, is robbed of power and chained by international laws, mutual understanding of civilized peoples, and the general progress of mankind. But two world wars, like the two hairy arms of the literal giant, Samson, have brought down the modern house of delusive progress. Beneath the ruins lie the crushed hopes, not only of modern Philistines, but of many who have paid at least lip service to the God of heaven.

Speaking literally, the so-called law of progress remains a figment of the mind of philosophers, a piece of wishful thinking. The theory of evolution, even if we were to grant for the sake of argument that it has been proved, now provides no support for the idea of progress. The latest in evolutionistic thinking departs far from the idea of early enthusiasts who saw evolution carrying us all upward as surely as an escalator lifts us up. Today, careful thinkers in that field confess they are not sure that evolution necessarily means progress. Rather, it may mean only adaptation for various forms of life, and possible annihilation for other forms that fail to adapt themselves to changing environment. Better education for the masses has resulted, not in less crime, as forecast by the public-school pioneer, Horace Mann, but in more cunning criminals. Better living conditions, symbolized often by more bathtubs in homes, have resulted in cleaner bodies, but not cleaner minds. Science, with its inventions and discoveries, stands revealed, not as the agent of progress, but as the handmaiden of destruction and chaos. Finally, man, the object of romantic eulogies by rationalists and liberal churchmen, stands exposed for what he really is, not a steadily evolving god, but a sorry creature whose good qualities, whatever they may be, are more than offset by his evil ones. With disillusionment quite complete, there are few who would question the present appropriateness of the inspired words: "The whole world lies in wickedness."

What is the significance, for Adventists, of the rise and fall of the idea of progress? The question will be answered in the next three chapters.

15. The First Angel's Message

In The two preceding chapters the rise and the decline of the idea of progress and of the perfectibility of man have been traced. The facts there set forth bear a most important relationship to the central teachings of the Advent movement, the three angels' messages.

Through the years we have often been guilty of attempting at one and the same time to prove both too little and too much in our treatment of this moot subject of the goodness or badness of the world. And to the extent we have done this, we have befogged the issue and have failed to show the full relationship of the subject to the threefold message.

And how have we been guilty, at times, of attempting to prove more than we need to prove? By seeking to prove that the very present generation is vastly worse in its morals, its practices, its gambling, its dissipation, its lawlessness, than any preceding generation. And to support this claim we offer, for example, newspaper clippings showing the appalling conditions presently existing in the world-crime, drunkenness, debauchery, and other debasing practices.

Probably no one would challenge the claim that the world today presents a black and sordid picture, and that in certain ways it undoubtedly is worse than when our fathers and grandfathers lived. But a critic of Adventism may rightly contend that proper perspective calls for a survey of centuries, not simply a generation or two. And such a critic need not be a believer in the idea of progress in order to raise a historically fortified objection that the record of former centuries could hardly be less black than that of the present. Some objectors may even remind us that Adventist teaching places the Dark Ages in the past, and glories in the spiritual enlightenment brought by the Protestant Reformation.

All this and much more can be, and often is, cited by those acquainted with history who wish to challenge the sweeping and unqualified claim sometimes made by Adventist preachers that the world today is much worse in morals and practices than it ever was in any past generation. And are Adventist critics correct in declaring that the picture of the past is black as an Egyptian night? The answer emphatically is, Yes, for all history makes most depressing reading, being one long chronicle of dark and dastardly deeds committed by sinful men. Then what is the weak spot in the argument sometimes presented by our ministers that the world is so very much worse today than it has ever been before?

Tried to Prove More Than Necessary

The answer is, we have sought to prove more than we needed to prove. And we have been led into doing this primarily because our theological opponents have been insisting through the long years that the world is steadily improving. We set out to prove that they were dead wrong, by presenting evidence to show that the world is very, very much worse. And there is nothing more pathetic than for a man who has a good case, to weaken it by trying to prove more than he needs to. The Bible paints a picture of evil rampant in the last days, of "perilous times," of abounding iniquity. How true that picture is. We see it before our eyes. But the Bible paints an equally dark picture of the past centuries, which we describe with vigor and horror as the Dark Ages. Then it was that the Scripture was fulfilled, that he that "kills you will think that he does God service." And it was during these long centuries, declare some critics, that there can be found a sufficient basis for the idea of increasing iniquity that is deduced from the text that "evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse."

But someone may ask: Then what is the real point in the Biblical statements that describe the evil state of our world in the last day? The reasonable answer is: To protect us against the delusive idea of progress and man's perfectibility, that has captured and controlled the thinking of churchmen as well as secularists during all the years that the Advent movement has been in the world. From the very outset the Advent pioneers were met with the bold declaration that world betterment lay ahead. But those pioneers, and we who followed them, were not led astray by this deception. There stood the warning words from Paul: "This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come." Our very insistence on the literal truth of such a statement protected us from the delusion of progress and placed us immediately in conflict with that prevailing view.

We took our stand on the premise that there is no Scriptural ground for believing that conditions will be better. In that we were, and are, correct. If we are able to show from Scripture and history that man is not rising to moral heights, that today it is true, even as it was nineteen hundred years ago, that "the whole world lies in wickedness," what more need we prove?

Secondary Reason for Unwarranted Conclusion

A secondary reason why some among us have sought to prove more than we need to prove regarding the wickedness of the world lies in the fact, already alluded to, that we make comparisons between our fathers' day and ours, and hasten to draw there from long-range conclusions that affect all past centuries. Furthermore, those comparisons have most frequently been made in America. In this land Adventist theological thinking was first shaped.

Now in the last generation the population of America has rapidly moved from the country to the cities, which have ever been centers of evil. It is a significant fact that Mrs. White, in her descriptions of abounding evil in the last days, focuses on the cities. (See, for example, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 9, pp. 89-96) There is no debating the fact that as multitudes have moved to great cities the moral tone of the populace has been lowered.

One cannot read far into Mrs. White's descriptions of increasing evils and of the supposedly fireproof structures rising in the great cities without being impressed that her prophetic eye was most directly focused on America, the land that cradled God's Advent movement, the country so directly described by the revelator John.

But Mrs. White has left on record a description of other lands and other days. When she was transported in vision to the Dark Ages, she penned a picture before which all else, even the present, seems to pale. And well she might, for that was the time of which our Lord spoke when He said that if those days were not shortened no flesh would be saved.

It is not difficult, to harmonize her fearful portrayal of the Dark Ages with her picture of the last days as wicked beyond words, and thus apparently worse than all past times. In her description of the "Conditions in the Cities" she declares:

"From age to age the Lord has made known the manner of His working. When a crisis has come, He has revealed Himself, and has interposed to hinder the working out of Satan's plans." - Testimonies, vol. 9 P. 91.

Ebb and Flow of Tides of Evil

Here is clearly set forth the thought of rising tides of evil, which seek ever and anon to engulf the whole world, but which are driven back by the interposition of God. The engulfing flood at the time of the Roman Empire was driven back by our Lord's first advent. The blackness of the Dark Ages was rolled back by the Reformation. For the elect's sake the days of satanic persecution were shortened. Later, men like Wesley arose in the power of the Spirit to revive men religiously. Wesley has been credited with saving England from a frightful revolution such as overran France, where peasants cried unavailingly for bread and then arose to slay their rulers.

This view of the sorry, sinister, and so-called Christian Era gives us a true picture of the history of evil, a picture that comports with the statement quoted from Mrs. White. For us to convey the idea of a world steadily sinking, without any periods of even partial reversal of the trend, is to leave no place for the mighty workings of God upon men and nations at various times. That fact should give us pause.

We may properly make some sobering comparisons between grand father's day and ours, and in so doing we shall find ourselves squaring with the Spirit of prophecy. But that is something quite different from those sweeping, unqualified assertions that some of us have made at times regarding the awful iniquity of he present as compared with all the past.

Furthermore, even in our comparisons of two closely connected generations in the setting of Mrs. White's words, we need to be restrained, and for a particular reason. We read in the Spirit of prophecy a dark picture of our day-which is our proper justification for describing it as very evil. But Spirit of prophecy descriptions of today have a way of merging into a picture of what the world will be like in the last hours of earth's history, when God's Spirit shall be completely withdrawn. Then indeed will be a state of evil without parallel, unless it be the hours just preceding the Flood. If we keep in mind that a prophet takes in the whole sweep of the future, we will be better able to make judicious use of the inspired words of the servant of God that not only describe the evils of our day but also of all the remaining days until the final hour when Satan holds complete sway over a rebellious world.

Failed to Prove All We Might

But if we have erred at times in attempting to prove too much in regard to the iniquity of the world today, we have also erred at times in failing to see how fully and forcefully the sorry state of the world supports our preaching of the three angels' messages. In other words, we have often failed to prove all that could be proved from the facts before us regarding the secularization of the world and the apostasy in Christendom. In this and the following two chapters will be shown the relation of these facts to the first, second, and third angels' messages, which are the heart of our message to the world, and hence the chief reason for our existence as a distinctive people.

What constitutes the first angel's message? A command and an announcement. The command: "Fear God, and give glory to him;... and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters." The announcement: "The hour of his judgment is come." (See Rev. 14:6, 7) The angel who gives this combined command and announcement is described as 'having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth." And rightly so. The inspired

explanation of the appalling depravity into which the human race sank in its early days, and in which it has continued to lie, is that men turned away from God. "Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. ... Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator. ... And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind." Rom. 1:21-28. The Gentiles are described as "being alienated from the life of God," and having therefore "given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness." Eph. 4:18, 19.

The Central Message of the Prophets

The burden of the message of holy men and prophets through the long ages has been that men should turn to the true God, the God who is ready to forgive, but also who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. Coupled with this has been the warning that God will come in judgment upon evildoers. The sad refrain in the chronicles of Israel is that they "forgot God" and turned to idols, so that they finally did worse than the vile heathen round about them. The appeal to Israel was:- Repent, and turn your selves from your idols." "Turn you, turn you from your evil ways; for why Will you die, O house of Israel?" Eze. 14:6; 33:11.

When Christ came He declared: "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou has sent." John 17:3. Christ came to reveal to men the Father as compassionate, but also as holy, as perfect. And His command was: "Be you therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." With this He coupled a warning of a day of wrath and of judgment to come.

The manner in which the apostles preached is revealed in Paul's description of the results of the gospel on the Thessalonians: "You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come." 1 Thess. 1:9,10. Again: "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself. ... Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be you reconciled to God." 2 Cor. 5:19,20.

When Paul spoke to the Athenians he described the true God as the one "that made the world and all things therein," and called on them to "repent" and serve this true God "because he bath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world." Acts 17:24,30,31.

Truly the Everlasting Gospel

In the setting of these inspired passages how truly may the first angel's message be described as the preaching of the "everlasting gospel." The fact that the words, "hour of his judgment," in the message, focus on the first part of God's great judgment work, does not set it apart from the message of coming judgment that prophets and apostles described, for the investigative judgment is the first phase of God's final judgment of all mankind. The uniqueness of the judgment message in Revelation 14:6, 7 is this: it is to be given at a certain time, in fulfillment of prophecy, and it is to be the last appeal to men to make ready for the great day of God. As Adventists we believe that message was due to be preached in 1844 and thereafter until the final climax. We have seen in this message of judgment a call to men to make ready for the Second Coming of

Christ, for the execution of the judgment is at the coming of Christ, and is the reason for His coming.

This message of Revelation 14:6, 7, along with the two messages immediately following, is of the essence of the truth we are to preach to men from the day of the rise of the Advent movement until Christ comes. But we can preach it in its fullness and with its greatest convicting power only as we see it in the setting of events developing in the world at the time the Advent movement was due to arise. Those developing events have been described briefly in the two preceding chapters. There it was shown that the Christian world began to break away from the control of apostate Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While some, following the teaching of the Protestant Reformers, exchanged the authority of the Catholic Church for the authority of the Bible, a large and steadily increasing number exchanged churchly authority for the authority of reason. Rationalism led men's minds ever farther away from God, the facts and forces of nature being increasingly explained so as to leave God out of the picture. As one writer well says, "The history of the modern Western mind may be said to be the history of a gradual secularization of man." - Wilhelm Pauck in The Church Against the World, p. 34. The blind forces of nature were becoming a substitute for God.

A prominent writer of the late nineteenth century picturesquely declared:

"Thus has gradually grown up, without our confessing it, a kind of scientific polytheism - one great Jehovah, perhaps, but with many agents or sub-gods, each independent, efficient, and doing all the real work in his own domain. The names of these, our gods, are gravity, light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, etc., and we are practically saying: 'These be your gods, 0 Israel, which brought you out of the land of Egyptian darkness and ignorance. These be the only gods you need fear, and serve, and study the ways Of.'" - Joseph Leconte, Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 298.

That was the picture-when the Advent movement began. How fitting the message: 'Fear God, and give glory to him." "Worship him that made heaven, and earth." When men were declaring that the endless future held only increasing progress' how appropriate to sound the warning of judgment at hand!

The Existence of God Challenged

The evidence presented in the preceding chapters reveals that the secularization so widespread at the time of the rise of Adventism has become almost universal today, that the very idea of God has been strongly challenged within the church itself by a school of thought called Humanism.

How strong that challenge has become in the last few decades is clearly revealed in the address by J. D. Jones, the moderator at the Fifth International Congregational Council, Bournemouth, England. Speaking on the subject "The Recovery of Our Sense of God," he declared in part:

"The facts are that at the moment the Church is to a large extent neglected, and religion seems to be losing its hold over vast masses of mankind. And this neglect of the Church and decay of religion is a symptom of something deeper and more serious still. That deeper and more serious thing is this-the very existence of God is being challenged and denied. The Church all down the

centuries has had to contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. It is familiar with battle. But when I think of the conflicts through which it has passed-the fight that raged around the question of the Person of Christ. The fight which Luther fought for the freedom of the Christian soul, the more recent disputes and controversies about the Bible and its inspiration, and the dates and authorship of its various books-they all seem to me to be affairs of 'outposts' and 'outworks ' compared to the fight that is upon us today. The attack today is riot upon the outworks but upon the citadel itself. It is the existence of God that is being called in question.

"Popular writers like H. G. Wells practically repudiate the idea of a personal God; Bernard Shaw talks about the 'life force'; others dissolve Him into 'the sum of all ideal values'; while others like Bertrand Russell deny Him altogether and declare that 'the individual soul must struggle alone with what of courage it can command against the whole weight of a Universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears.' The teaching of the Scientists, backed by certain of the New Psychologists, who reduce God to a projection of the human mind, percolates through magazine and novel into the minds of the men and women of our day. It creates their intellectual atmosphere, and in that atmosphere, touched by what Mr. Walter Lippmann calls the 'acids of modernity,' belief in God, in the Christian God, has simply dissolved." - The Congregationalist, July 24, 1930, p. 103.

God and Moral Standards

When God disappears from men's minds, what is the inevitable effect upon Christian ethics, that is, upon Christian standards of morality? The Congregationalist moderator immediately answers thus:

"With the dissolving of the belief in God has come a challenge to the whole Christian ethic. Huxley and Tyndall, whatever may be said of their materialistic philosophy, were men of high ethical standards. I remember hearing Dr. Fairbairn describe John Morley (as he was then) as the best Christian in the Cabinet of which he was a member, though he was a professed agnostic and spelled the word 'God' always with a small 'g'. That was the peculiarity of the agnosticism of fifty years ago-while rejecting the Christian faith, it accepted and observed Christian ethics. But that position could not for long be maintained. Flowers will not grow if they have no root, and the Christian ethic has no compulsive authority apart from the Christian belief in God. This is the point Mr. Walter Lippmann stresses in his book, A Preface to Morals. Men no longer believe in a Sovereign God, a God who rules this world and who by the hand of Moses issued a moral code for His subjects, and therefore that moral code has lost its binding authority."

An eminent scientist of the early twentieth century, the late Henry Fairfield Osborn, offers similar testimony in the following admission:

"It may be said without scientific or religious prejudice that the world-wide loss of the older religious and Biblical foundation of morals has been one of the chief causes of human decadence in conduct, in literature, and in art." - The Earth Speaks to Bryan, p. 63.

These quotations are typical of many that might he given in proof that the disappearance of God results in a disappearance also of Christian standards of morality. Without belief in a "Sovereign

God, a God who rules this world," the "moral code" has no "binding authority." The relationship which the Bible sets up between forgetting God and falling into sin and immorality is proved true again down here in the last days of earth's history, even as it has been proved true innumerable times before.

Present Compared With Past

The chief reason why this present-day general departure from God has not reflected itself more sharply in a lower moral level as compared with that of former generations is that a great majority of those living in earlier generations were also without God. No contradiction is stated. In the Colonial Era in America only about five per cent of the population were church members, the ninety-five per cent presumably had no clearly defined Christian idea of God to lose from their minds. In England, and certainly on the Continent, spiritual conditions were no better. Wesley's preaching to England's unchurched masses vividly illustrates this fact. But in earlier generations the clergy all held to the elementary doctrine of a personal God, and to the limited number who actually came under their influence they taught this doctrine.

In our modern times the apostles of progress have pointed with assurance to the fact that more than fifty per cent of the population in the United States are church members. As though that in itself proved that the country was far more Christian, far more moral, than in past generations. But what they forget is that the ministers who preach to this fifty percent or those of them that attend church-have been deeply tainted with skeptical, godless theories, some of them even to the point of accepting Humanism, which is simply a "poetic form of atheism."

In former times the uneducated and often unchurched masses might have little consciousness of God, for lack of positive training in religion. In our present day it is true that many humble church members believe sincerely the Bible. But the generally educated masses, despite their church contacts, often have an actively negative attitude toward God because of the skeptical theories they are frequently taught in church as well as in school. Thus it proves true that a day of great intellectual enlightenment d" not produce a generation lighted by the truth of God. That is why darkness continues to cover the earth and gross darkness the people. And that is why the world still lies in wickedness.

A Most Timely Message

All this is but another way of saying that the call to men to worship the God who made heaven and earth (Rev. 14:6, 7), which was timely in 1844, has gained increasing timeliness as the years have passed by. This fact we need to realize and to stress in our preaching.

Reverting to the evidence of the preceding chapter: In view of the collapse of the idea of progress, how timely the message that the hour of God's judgment has come. Judgment on a world that "lies in wickedness" and that a better world is soon to be set up by the Second Advent of Christ!

One of the most telling arguments set forth for the need of the Second Advent is the obvious and easily established fact that the world is no better than it was in past centuries. The edge of the blade of Second Advent preaching has been repeatedly dulled through the long generations past

by the corrosive heresy that the world will gradually be improved by the efforts of man until we shall have a virtual Paradise here. The blade can be kept to razor sharpness by affirming the fact that the world still "lies in wickedness." There are only two solutions of the tragedy of our world that have been offered by churchmen throughout the history of Christendom: (1) the improvement of the world by man's efforts, and (2) the renovation of the world by the supernatural appearing of Christ. If the former solution stands exposed as impossible of accomplishment there remains only the latter, the Biblical teaching for which we stand.

Instead of dealing with the question of the relative wickedness of the world as simply one of a series of signs showing the nearness of the Advent, and attempting to prove more than we easily can. We should give to the question a more basic significance by showing that the evident failure of the world to rise from the pit of iniquity in which it has wallowed for ages, constitutes a powerful reason why Christ should come.

Excellent Setting for Adventist Preaching

Let us repeat, the bankruptcy of the doctrine of world progress, because of the exposure of the innate evil of the human heart, makes a marvelous setting in which to preach the Advent. With the idea of world progress bankrupt. Adventists should take over the receivership. We can thunder forth: It is the Second Advent or nothing! We actually need not prove that the world is one whit worse than it ever was in order for that thundering challenge to echo and re-echo over the whole earth and to demand the sober attention of all men. And the thunder of our challenge is now reinforced by the roar of atomic bombs. A wicked world is today able to do what it formerly could not do-destroy itself! Thus our challenge can now ring out with irresistible power: It is the Second Advent or chaos!

If we can give so awesome a message as that to the world, while standing on the undebatable and simple premise that "the whole world lies in wickedness". Why endanger the force of that message by unnecessary, and sometimes questionable, arguments as to whether in this or that particular way the world is worse than formerly?

Undoubtedly there are ways in which men are worse than they were at some other periods in the past. Certain kinds of evil take on new forms and new potency at different times. Today, for example, the evils of war are the most frightful ever, and have stimulated men to depths of brutality and mass murder hardly paralleled in world history. The grisly facts of World War 11 neutralize quite completely such proofs of world progress as abolition of slavery, better economic conditions for the masses, and the like.

But why enter into needless debate on the relative awfulness of different forms of iniquity that sweep men down to the pit in one generation or another? There may have been a day, earlier in our history, when it seemed worth while thus to debate, because the idea of progress was dominant. But surely not today! Our erstwhile opponents in this area of discussion now quite generally make abject admission that man is not progressing, that on the contrary there is something desperately the matter with him and with the world.

Changing Battle Lines

Lines of battle in theology, even as in literal warfare, change from time to time. To attack a deserted position is, to say the least, a sorry waste of energy and ammunition. That long-held, strategic sector of the enemy lines known as the idea of world progress is now almost completely abandoned. Those who once confidently attacked our opposing position, the supernatural Second Advent, must now spend their time reforming their lines because of having to abandon their world progress sector, from which they formerly sallied forth. We can today boldly deploy ourselves over the strategically important field known as the doctrine of man's inherently evil nature, with hardly a challenging shot's being fired. We even find joining us on that field some from the other side who frankly declare that they now believe our side in the controversy is right. Standing thus today on that strategic field, Aye can again sound our battle cry: The Second Advent or chaos! And go forth more successfully than ever before to win men to the banner of our soon-coming Lord.

What a day in which to preach the first angel's message!

16. The Second Angel's Message

And There followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." Rev. 14:8.

'Babylon of the Apocalypse is the professed church united with the world." - Uriah Smith, Thoughts on Daniel and the Revelation, p. 648, rev. ed. The fall of Babylon is a spiritual one, and is due to two causes: (1) alliance with civil power, described in the Scriptures as fornication with the kings of the earth; and (2) teaching false doctrine. On this point Mrs. E. G. White declares:

"This cup of intoxication which she [Babylon] 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." - The Great Controversy, p. 388.

Now, it is not hard to prove, as regards Roman Catholicism, that Babylon is fallen. But Babylon involves all Christendom. Protestantism can easily be proved guilty on the first count of alliance with the kings of the earth. Even from the earliest days of Protestantism there have been state churches. Nor is it difficult to show that throughout most of Protestant history there has been a distressing degree of conformity to the world and lack of godliness. But religious bodies are chiefly distinguished by the beliefs they hold. Thus in order to show that the second angel's message is truly and completely being fulfilled in our day, we must show that Protestantism has fallen away from true doctrines.

Protestantism arose from Rome in the sixteenth century. It did not fall then. True, the creeds formulated by Protestant bodies retarded the rise from the errors of Rome. But the direction, in general, was upward toward Scriptural truth and the purity of the gospel. The great Protestant bodies, as they arose, stood firmly on the high platform of the authority of the Bible, the personality of God, the deity of Christ, the blood atonement, and the Second Advent of Christ in judgment.

Although these and related primary truths of the Scripture were not always clearly and correctly held, and though they were sometimes mingled with errors of Rome, we can still truly say that the rise of Protestantism marked a rise in spiritual understanding and doctrine.

The Timing of the Prophecy

But the prophecy being considered declares that "Babylon is fallen." And when should we look for this prophecy to be fulfilled, or at least for the message concerning its fulfillment to be proclaimed? The second cannot precede the first, and the first began to be proclaimed in a definite, organized way about the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. Mrs. White states that the second angel's message "was first preached in the summer of 1844." - The Great Controversy, p. 389.

And where was it first preached? "It then had a more direct application to the churches of the United States." - Ibid. And why? Because this was "where the warning of the judgment had been most widely proclaimed and most generally rejected, and where the declension of the churches had been most rapid." - Ibid.

Now, was the second angel's message completely fulfilled in the year 1844? No. "The message of the second angel did not reach its complete fulfillment in 1844." - Ibid. And why? Writing in 1888, Mrs. White declared: "The work of apostasy has not yet reached its culmination." - Ibid. "The change is a progressive one, and the perfect fulfillment of Rev. 14:8 is yet future." - Ibid., p. 390. Commenting further on this point of progressive fulfillment, Mrs. White declares:

"Revelation 18 points to the time, when as a result of rejecting the threefold warning of Rev. 14:6-12, the church will have fully reached the condition foretold by the second angel, and the people of God still in Babylon will be called upon to separate from her communion. This message is the last that will ever be given to the world; and it will accomplish its work." - Ibid.

The Message the Churches Rejected

What was the message preached in 1844 which the churches rejected" and thus set in motion a "progressive" declension that would finally fulfill completely the prophecy of Revelation 14:8? The answer is that the churches rejected the doctrine of the literal, personal Second Advent of Christ to bring an end to a world of sin and to create a new heavens and a new earth wherein dwells righteousness.

The churches opposed the message of the literal, personal coming of Christ with the doctrine of the spiritual coming of our Lord that put into the dim future, if ever, the actual coming. Instead of teaching that Christ would come in judgment on this present evil world, they taught the doctrine of world conversion and a temporal millennium. The facts on this have already been presented in chapter 13.

The Real Point of Controversy

There have been critics of Adventism who sought to make high sport of our doctrine of the second angel's message by declaring that we condemned the churches of 1844 and have

continued to condemn them since then because they refused to believe the false teaching that the Lord would come on October 22, 1844. But from evidence already presented it is clear that this charge is false, because it fails to state the whole case. An examination of the controversy between Adventists and the various churches in 1844 leaves no possible doubt that the real point of conflict was the question of the nature of the impending event and not the time of the occurrence of that event.

The 1844 opponents of Millerism, let it be repeated here, were generally willing to admit that Adventists followed sound principles of prophetic interpretation and that the great time prophecies were probably coming to their fulfillment in the nineteenth century. In fact, some of the opponents were as definite on the matter of prophetic time as were the Adventists under William Miller. In other words, if William Miller and the Advent preachers had proclaimed that 1844 would mark the beginning of an earthly millennium which would grow more glorious for a thousand years to come, probably no opposition would have been raised.

That the real controversy dealt with the literal versus the spiritual coming of Christ becomes even more evident when we examine the article by the Millerite leader Charles Fitch entitled "Come Out of Her, My People." 17 This article, apparently, was the first Millerite presentation of the prophetic subject of the fall of Babylon in relation to the command: "Come out of her, my people." Fitch's thesis was this:

Catholicism, and later on, Protestantism, when preaching the doctrine of the spiritual coming of Christ and a temporal millennium, were guilty of putting off the coming of the Lord. Hence they belonged to that company of evil servants who declare, "My Lord delays his coming." They lulled men to sleep in a sense of false security.

Fitch also charged that the doctrine of the spiritual reign of Christ took away from our Lord His reality and that therefore the preachers of this doctrine fell under the indictment of the apostle John. "Every spirit that confesses not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God. And this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof you have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world." 1 John 4:1 Declared Fitch:

"To confess with the lips Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, and yet to he Opposed in heart and life to the objects for which He came, is certainly to be Antichrist. The spirit therefore which is of God, while it confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, will cordially embrace, and heartily enter into all the objects for which he was thus manifested. All else must be Antichrist. What then was the end for which Jesus Christ was manifested in the flesh?"

A Personal Return of Christ

After declaring that Christ came to suffer for our sins, Fitch inquires:

"But did Jesus Christ come in the flesh for no purpose but to suffer? Hear Peter on the day of Pentecost, after he had been baptized with the Holy Ghost, and fully qualified to set forth the objects of Christ's coming. Acts 2:29, 'Men and brethren, let me freely speak to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulcher is with us unto this day. Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn, with an oath to him, that of the

fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, He would raise up Christ to sit on his throne: he, seeing this before, spoke of the resurrection of Christ. Here we are informed that God had sworn with an oath to David, that He would raise up Christ in the flesh to sit on David's throne. Christ was therefore to come in the flesh to reign on David's throne, and was raised up from the dead with flesh and bones for that purpose, and in that same body ascended to heaven. And angels declared that He would so come again, in like manner as He went into heaven.

Now, as His ascension is personal, His coming must be personal. ...

"In the new earth wherein dwells righteousness, therefore, Christ will sit personally and eternally on David's throne, ruling the world in righteousness, and of His kingdom there shall be no end. ... Hence it follows, that whoever is opposed to the personal reign of Jesus Christ over this world on David's throne, is Antichrist."

Fitch then asks: "Who is opposed to the personal reign of Christ on David's throne?" and answers thus:

"First. The entire Roman Catholic Church. The primitive church believed in the personal reign of Christ, and looked and longed for it, and waited for His appearing, and loved it as the apostles had done before them. Justin Martyr, one of the primitive Christians, declares that this was the faith in which all the orthodox in the primitive church, agreed. But when the papacy came into power, they concluded to have Christ reign, not personally, but spiritually, and hence the Pope entered into the stead of Christ, and undertook to rule the world for Him-claiming to be God's vicegerent on earth. Inasmuch, therefore, as the Papists wish to retain their power, we find them all opposed to Christ's coming to establish a personal reign. They are willing that Christ should reign spiritually, provided they can be His acknowledged agents, and thus bring the world to bow down wholly to their dictation, and use God's authority for their own aggrandizement."

Protestantism Indicted With Rome

After discussing at some length the Catholic Church, Fitch raises the question:

"Is the Catholic Church only, opposed to the personal reign of Christ? What shall we say of Protestant Christendom in this respect? Among all the sects into which the Protestant church is divided, where is one that is not decidedly hostile to the Bible truth that Christ has been raised up to sit personally on David's throne? Indeed, where has such a notice originated, as that Christ is to have only a spiritual reign? There is nothing in the Bible that furnishes the least shadow of a foundation for such an idea. Paul has, however, given us a clue to the origin of the very thing. (2 Tim. 4:3, 4) 'For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned to fables.' This is at present true of all sects in Protestant Christendom. The sound Scriptural doctrine of the personal reign of Christ on David's throne cannot now be endured, and hence the teachers which the various sects have been heaping to themselves have turned away their ears to the groundless fable of a spiritual reign of Christ, during what is called a temporal millennium, when they expect all the world will be converted; and each sect is expecting at that time to have the predominant influence.... But no one of them is willing to have Christ come in person to rule the world for Himself, while they take their place at

His feet to do His bidding, nor are they willing to listen for a moment to what the Bible says respecting Christ's personal coming.... They profess to be desiring the spiritual reign of Christ, and to be living for the conversion of the world to the religion of the crucified Nazarene. Tell them, however, that Christ is coming in person, according to the oath of God, to carry out the principles of His own religion for ever, and they are ready to fight against it with all their might."

Conflict of Belief as to Nature of Advent

These quotations make it abundantly evident that the primary controversy between our Millerite forebears and the opposing churches was over the question of whether the coming of Christ was to be literal or spiritual. It is true that the time element, the 1844 Advent date, is brought into the discussion. But this was only in a limited, minor way after the main indictment had been brought against popular churches because of their opposition to the Scriptural doctrine of the personal coming of Christ. On the time aspect, which was the chief error in the Millerite preaching of the Second Advent, Fitch declares, for example:

"All these pretended Christian sects are particularly opposed to the idea that Christ is coming speedily in person, to take the dominion of the world; and especially to the idea that there is Bible evidence for believing that He will come during the present Jewish year."

Fitch goes on to ask the question, "What is it for God's people to come out of Babylon?" and answers thus:

'To come out of Babylon is to be converted to the true Scriptural doctrine of the personal coming and kingdom of Christ. To receive the truth on this subject with all readiness of mind as you find it plainly written out on the pages of the Bible. To love Christ's appearing, and rejoice in it, and fully and faithfully to avow to the world your unshrinking belief in God's word touching this momentous subject, and to do all in your power to open the eyes of others, and influence them to a similar course, that they may be ready to meet their Lord."

An Appeal to the Churches

Fitch then devotes a paragraph to the time element in the Advent preaching, but when he comes to making a direct appeal a little farther on "to come out of Babylon," he focuses directly and quite exclusively on the question of spiritualizing away the Advent, as the following words reveal:

"Throw away that miserable medley of ridiculous spiritualizing nonsense with which multitudes have so long been making the word of God of none effect, and dare to believe the Bible. ...

"Away forever with your miserable transcendental philosophy, that would make the throne of David a spiritual throne, and the coming of Christ to sit upon it as a spiritual coming, and His reign a spiritual reign. Thanks be to God, His kingdom cannot be blown up into such spiritual bubbles as these, for a thousand, or even 365 thousand years. And then blown for ever away into some ethereal something, which some sneering infidel has defined, to be sitting on a cloud and singing Psalms to all eternity. No, no. Jesus Christ has been raised up in David's flesh immortalized, and He shall come in that flesh glorified."

Thus wrote Charles Fitch, the fervent Advent leader, in the summer of 184.3. His view soon leavened the lump of Adventist believers, and in the summer of 1844 the cry, "Babylon is fallen, come out of her, my people," began to be heard wherever Advent preachers held forth. To believe in the personal coming of Christ in glory to bring rewards to all, stood forth in Adventist preaching as the essence of all true Christian thinking concerning God's plan for this world. The opposing doctrine of the spiritual coming of Christ, with a temporal millennium and world conversion, stood for a denial of the doctrine of the supernatural, personal coming of our Lord and hence as a symbol of apostasy from apostolic teaching.

Put Finger on Real Issue

We need not agree with all the reasoning set forth by Charles Fitch and other Advent preachers in what they wrote or said concerning Babylon and its fall. It may be argued that they restricted too much the meaning of the prophetic forecast concerning the fall of Babylon, and certainly they were in error to the extent that they drew in a time element. But admitting all this-and we can freely do so, still leaves valid and meaningful the heart of their preaching and of their indictment of the churches. These pioneer Adventists put their finger on the real issue when they dealt with the question of the spiritual versus the personal coming of Christ; for fundamentally different conceptions of the whole plan of God for this world grow out of those two conceptions of Christ's coming. We have already seen in an earlier chapter how the doctrine of the spiritual coming of Christ led on to a virtual denial of the whole idea of the coming of Christ and prepared the minds of religious leaders to support essentially secular ideas of world progress.

The Advent pioneers of the 1840's were also correct in declaring that the false doctrine of the spiritual coming of Christ grew out of false principles of spiritualizing Scripture that ultimately rob the Bible of any direct or literal message to the souls of men. The Reformers of the sixteenth century showed clearly that Rome by her spiritualizing of Scripture gave to it a nose of wax, as Luther declared, that could be turned in one direction or another, and hence the Bible lost its value as an authoritative spiritual guide for life. In the nineteenth century arose the Advent movement to speak out against false teachings in Protestantism concerning the primary truth of the Second Coming of our Lord, teachings that were the fruitage of a spiritualizing tendency that had steadily developed in Protestantism.

Summarize Developments in Apostasy

So much for the historical record concerning the first preaching of the second angel's message in 1844 in America. We have already read the statement by Mrs. White from The Great Controversy, which was written in 1888, that "the work of apostasy has not yet reached its culmination," that "the change is a progressive one, and the perfect fulfillment of Rev. 14:8 is yet future." In an earlier chapter on the rise of the idea of progress we learned that the doctrine of the spiritual coming of Christ and the temporal millennium became increasingly secularized as the supernatural element disappeared. And that this was the result of an acceptance by the churches of skeptical theories and higher criticism. We also saw how Darwin supplanted Moses in the thinking of an increasing number of clergy in regard to the beginnings of Bible history. Needless to say, Protestant ministers, when confronted with the plausible arguments for evolution, discovered an easy way to harmonize evolution and the Bible by spiritualizing away the

scriptures which describe the creation of our world. They had already spiritualized away scriptures concerning the end of the world.

But this acceptance of evolution by an increasing number of the clergy in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and onward produced a revolution in theological thought more complete and sudden than in any preceding period in the history of the Christian church. Let us summarize the principal Christian doctrines that were vitally affected as churchmen gave increasing car to scientific dogmas in general and to evolution in particular. Doctrines Affected by Evolution

Belief in the supernatural inevitably waned. There was no place for miracles, no place for any supernatural intervention on the part of God. That would be contrary to the workings of natural law. There was no place for God. He became quite unnecessary. As one leading evolutionist years ago expressed it, 'Evolution pushes the Creator out of doors." There was no place for prayer, as that term has been known throughout the history of the Christian church. For prayer is an act of communion with a personal God and such communion has meaning only on the premise that God is free to act in response to our prayers. There was no place for the Christ of the Bible, for His virgin birth, for His miraculous deeds, for His literal resurrection, or for His bodily ascension. There was no place for the doctrine of the fall of man unless it be a fall upward through the evolutionary ages. Hence there was no place for the doctrine of sin, unless it be viewed as one of the vestigial remains of our animal heritage. But if there was no fall and no sin, then there was no place for the atonement. Nor was there a place for the law of God. The Bible statement that God wrote the Ten Commandments with His own finger was explained away, as are other miraculous statements of Scripture. But if we have no divine law we have no divine definition of sin. There was no place for the doctrine of the Second Advent. Scientific and evolutionistic thought ruled it out altogether. A personal, supernatural coming of Christ is contrary to the orderly processes of nature. Finally, there was no place in the thinking of a rapidly increasing number of the clergy for any idea of a literal heaven. Heaven became a state and not a place.

How true was the statement of Mrs. White in 1888, that 1he work of apostasy has not yet reached its culmination." The denial of the Christian doctrines just discussed has largely been subsequent to 1988. In fact, it was not until the 1920's that the Protestant apostasy came to such full fruitage that its true nature was evident to all. It was in 1928, for example, that a Modernist minister wrote two articles under the title "A Modernist's Criticism of Modernism," in which he made the most amazing admissions concerning what had taken place in the Protestant world. His confession is a startling commentary on the prophetic words, 'Babylon is fallen." The author of these articles, William Henry Spence, declares:

"The losses incident to the liberalizing of religion fall naturally into two classes: "(1) Those endured by institutional religion;
"(2) Those affecting personal religious experience."
He illustrates the first with this statement:

"The most obvious evidence of the weakening influence of liberalism on the church is the absenteeism of the educated-or one should say, many of the educated. The acquisition of the liberal viewpoint has meant, for great numbers of them, a lessening of loyalty to the church, and the forsaking of its altars."

A Cause for "Deepest Distress"

On the second point he writes at length. Here are a few key paragraphs:

"There are some changes wrought by liberalism in the lives of men, which a pastor whose vocation is the cure of souls, observes with deepest distress. As he watches the cooling of religious ardor, the loosening of the grasp on spiritual realities, the progressive and easygoing tolerance of unethical practices, the increasing neglect of the 'means of grace? And the blurring of conviction through pride of intellect, in one after another of his parishioners, his intimate friends and his fellow clergymen, he is tempted to say now and then, adapting the words of Festus: 'Much learning hath made thee apostate.

This preacher has little sympathy, of course, for Fundamentalists. But he is willing to make this damaging admission concerning them:

"Certainly the Fundamentalist with his faith in the divine kinship of man is nearer right, than those liberals who, influenced by certain evolutionary theories, reduce him to a mere automaton, produced by reaction to environment." - The Congregationalist, Aug. 9, 1928.

As a Modernist, Spence, of course, believes that there has been great value in the 'Historical study of the Bible," which means the higher critical analysis of Scripture which resulted in robbing the Bible of its unique status as the infallible and inspired Word of God. But he confesses that some great and perhaps irreparable damage has been done to the Scripture and thus to the faith of the multitudes. Says he:

"The destruction of the Bible's infallibility has ruined its authority for multitudes.... To some liberals it has become little more than a source book of rather doubtful value for historical study. In the resulting confusion, both the man in the crowd and the liberal scholar often are like a sailor who has thrown over chart and compass, and vainly tries to steer his course under a sky whose stars are hidden by the clouds.

"When one thinks of what the old faith in the Bible did for our fathers and mothers and the kind of family life it inspired them to create, one feels less and less inclined to swagger over the fruits of the so-called modern view of the Bible.. .. With the Holy Book in their hands they felt themselves fortified by an impregnable rock. They spoke to us of duty and grace with a confidence supported by producing evidence. The printed page with its golden words gave them a sense of immediacy in their practice of the Divine Presence. When faith grew dim the opening of the Good Book brought renewal. When they were confused in any moral crisis, a quick turning to the sacred page gave them guidance. When sorrow and adversity overtook them, the precious promises gave them unspeakable comfort. When they drew near to death, the recollection of certain verses treasured in memory flung open the gates of new life to them.

"But what of us, the sons of such parents with the advantages of our higher learning, real or supposed? Must we not confess that a glory has departed from us? Has our liberalism given us an equivalent for that which we surrendered when we gave up our parents' belief in the Book? The necessity is upon us to find something to give us what the Bible gave them. The feeling of security in a trouble ridden world, clearness and definiteness of religious convictions, the accent of authority in our testimony of religious experience and a firm, sure hold of faith in Christ-or else liberalism will yet become the great apostasy." - Ibid.

A Startling Warning

Toward the close of his second article he utters this startling warning:

"Just now modernists should awake to the fact that a liberalism which tends toward a Godless humanism or rank atheism is heading toward its own destruction." - Ibid., Aug. 16, 1928.

This amazing confession, written in 1928, was followed by many equally startling confessions in the 1930's, some of which have been quoted in a preceding chapter. But although Protestantism, which has fallen away from the historic doctrines of Christianity, admits its sorry state, it takes no steps in any well-defined or united way to return to these great Bible teachings. That is the present sad plight of Protestantism. It may see the weakness of the skeptical scientific assumptions it began to accept in the nineteenth century, which produced finally a loss of faith in Christian teachings. But there appears to be no evidence that Protestantism tends to return or even to see the need of returning to the basic premises or assumptions on which the Christian's faith must be built. Walter Lippmann well wrote:

"If faith is to flourish there must be a conception of how the universe is governed to support it. It is these supporting conceptions-the unconscious assumption that we are related to God as creatures to creator, as vassals to a king, as children to a father-that the acids of modernity have eaten away." - A Preface Morals, p. 56.

Elsewhere in this same much-discussed work, Lippmann observes:

"This is the first age, I think, in the history of mankind when the circumstances of life have conspired with the intellectual habits of the time to render any fixed and authoritative belief incredible to large masses of men." - Ibid., p. 12.

The evidence seems clear that we have finally come to the a-v, of the complete, or virtually complete, fulfillment of the second angel's message. That means we have come to the day when we must put a new emphasis on our preaching of the second angel's message.

17. The Third Angel's Message

The Third angel's message as recorded in Revelation 14: 9-11 has two aspects, a negative and a positive. There is the warning against receiving the mark of authority of an apostate power, and by clear implication there is the call to receive the mark of divine authority, the seal of the living God, who is distinguished as the Creator of heaven and earth. In other words, the third angel's

message is a warning against the keeping of Sunday and a call to men to keep God's true Sabbath day.

The true Sabbath has two distinguishing marks: (1) The mark of time. "The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God." (2) The purpose. The Sabbath was instituted as a memorial of a certain historical event, the creation of the world -- in six days the Lord made heaven and earth."

Hence, in order to understand the importance of the Sabbath and thus of the third angel's message, we must see the significance of the creation event which the Sabbath memorializes. And we must see this in the setting of the facts already presented regarding the disappearance of the very idea of God, which is the climax of the modern apostasy in Christendom.

The Genesis doctrine of creation presents the true doctrine of God, on which all other doctrines must be reared. The creation record presents God as above and apart from the things He creates. In the language of theology this is known as the doctrine of the transcendence of God. Only as we think of God as transcendent can we think of Him as personal. Either God is apart from and above all created things or else He is a part of the universe itself. There is a vast distinction. Much of the pagan world early fell into the pantheistic heresy of thinking that God is in the brook, the tree, the mountain, the river, the winds-yes, everywhere in general but nowhere in particular. The result was that the very idea of God lost all meaning. Modern religionists who were horrified at the thought of dismissing God from the scientific processes in our modern world, largely fell into this other evil of identifying God with nature and thus destroying any idea of a personal God.

The Bible record declares: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." No more primary or more important truth could have been set forth in the opening words of Holy Writ. Before all else, God. Before there was a mountain or a valley or a stream or a cloud, before even the earth itself, there is the great God. An intelligent power, apart from this earth of ours, at work to bring forth order and every kind of created thing-that. is the Bible doctrine regarding God and our world.

Bible Presents All-powerful God

The creation account presents to us not only a transcendent but also an all-powerful God. Even among those who have held to the idea of God there has often been found the heresy that God is limited by the universe in which He dwells; in other words, that He is not all-powerful. The modern skeptic scoffs at the thought that God knows all about every one of us. The creation account pictures God as being so powerful that He need only speak and even inanimate nature responds at once. "He spoke, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." Ps. 33:9. A majestic picture of God's absolute and immediate control of all things is given to us in the frequent refrain of the creation narrative, "and it was so." "God said, Let there be a firmament. ... and it was so." "God said, Let the earth bring forth grass ... and it was so." "God said, Let there be lights in the firmament ...: and it was so."

The prophets of old presented the fact of creation as one of the proofs that God is omnipotent. Wrote Isaiah: 'Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that brings out their host by number: He calls them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is

strong in power; not one fails." Isa. 40:26. Then follows the lesson for the individual soul: "Why sayest thou, 0 Jacob, and spoke, 0 Israel, my way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God? Has thou not known? Has thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, faints not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding." Verses 27, 28.

A Personal God Set Forth

The creation story sets before us the truth of a personal God, and it is this truth that constitutes the citadel of revealed religion, the citadel so violently attacked today by secularists and liberal theologians. No blind impersonal force moves through the opening pages of Holy Writ. We hear the stately stepping of a personal God from the beginning of the record right through to the sorrowful moment when "the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day" met the sinful pair and brought their Eden residence to an end. How forcefully is the fact of a personal God brought to our minds by the declaration, "God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Gen. 1:26.

The opening chapters of Genesis set before us a moral God. One of the most seductive delusions of the devil is that right and wrong are merely relative terms to be defined in relation to changing customs and viewpoints from generation to generation in various lands. Such a view makes meaningless the whole idea of fixed and eternal standards of right, by which all men shall finally be judged. The Bible in its very opening chapters gives us a picture of a moral God who is directly concerned over absolute standards of right and wrong. In the Genesis record is the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil." There is no mistaking the primary truth that moral standards have a place in men's lives, and that the distinguishing mark of sin is that it is disobedience to the commands of a personal God. If that truth were sensed today, what a difference it might make in the attitude of many persons toward sin!

One cannot read the creation story and the comments upon it throughout the Scriptures without being, profoundly impressed that God has a plan and a purpose for our world. One of the most cynical aspects of the evolution theory as generally held, and of various false views concerning God, is that our world is the result of accident and chance, that there is no purpose or destiny to life. A whole host of evils easily spring from such a hopeless view. But that dark view of life is not found in the Bible. We read that when God created living creatures He placed them in a well- ordered world. There is reason and purpose for each of His actions. Isaiah wrote, "Thus says the Lord that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he bath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited." Isa. 45:16. In the Genesis record man stands forth in Eden as the climax of a planned work of God, a being in God's image, designed by His Creator to live in holiness and obedience and never-ending happiness in a perfect world.

Creation and Plans of Salvation

Not only does the creation account in Genesis give us a true conception of God, it gives us also a true setting for the plan of salvation and final restitution. Indeed, the creation story provides the only setting in which the whole plan of salvation can have real meaning. The rejection of the Genesis account makes meaningless that divine plan. Sin, salvation, the atonement-these and other key words of the Bible are robbed of all meaning when they are not viewed in the setting of

the Bible creation. It is only when we see sin against the spotless background of Eden that we can sense the true hideousness of rebellion against God.

Finally, the creation account has meaning and purpose, in relation not only to our present world and to God's plan of salvation, but also to the world to come. A true picture of the final reward of the righteous is possible only as we know and believe in the Genesis story of the beginnings of our world. Nothing aids so greatly in forming a correct view of the nature of man as a true picture of the final abode of the righteous, and that true picture is obtained by having a right understanding of the nature of the original abode. We find that Adam dwelt in a real world as a real being, that he had a home, and that he did such real things as dressing and keeping the Garden of Eden.

When we read that God's plan is to restore the lost estate by creating a new earth, we can properly conclude that the final place of reward for the righteous will be a real place. We can take literally the words of Isaiah regarding those who will dwell on the "new earth": "They shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them." Isa. 65:21 .

With such a view of our future abode, we are prepared to see the significance of the resurrection of the body, a truth so plainly taught in the Bible, and so little taught in the Christian churches. A real place of abode calls for real people to inhabit it. The idea of disembodied spirits forever flitting about in a heaven as misty and vague as the spirits does not square with the Bible picture of the new earth.

Creation the Foundation Truth

The great truth of the creation stands revealed, therefore, as the foundation truth on which the whole structure of Bible doctrine is reared. How important, then, that it should ever be kept bright in the minds of men.

Hence it follows that belief in the Genesis account of creation is the distinguishing mark of a man who believes (1) in a personal God with infinite qualities and powers. (2) In the Bible as the one supreme authority. (3) And in the divine plan of salvation by which a holy God redeems His fallen children, sanctifies them, and finally places them in Eden restored.

The Sabbath is the mark, or sign, of the man who believes in creation and thus in all that creation signifies. This statement is self-evident, for the commandment is explicit that the reason for the keeping of the Sabbath is that we shall remember the great fact that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and rested the seventh day. James G. Murphy, in his Commentary on the Book of Exodus, well remarks:

"The observance of the Sabbath connects man with the origin of his race, with the six days' creation, and with the Creator Himself. The connection is manifestly a historical one. He that observes the Sabbath aright holds the history of that which it celebrates to be authentic, and therefore believes in the creation of the first man, in the creation of a lair abode for man in the space of six days, in the primeval and absolute creation of the heavens and the earth, and, as a necessary antecedent to all this, in the Creator, who at the close of His latest creative effort rested on the seventh day. The Sabbath thus becomes the sign by which the believers in a historical

Revelation are distinguished from those who have allowed these great facts to fade from their remembrance (Exodus 31:13). ... The observance of the Sabbath, then, becomes the characteristic of those who cherish the recollections of the origin of their race, and who worship God not merely as Elohim, the everlasting almighty, but as Jehovah, the historical God, the Creator, who has revealed Himself to man from the dawn of his existence as the God of love, and afterwards of mercy and grace, of promise and performance." - Comments on Exodus 20:8-11, p. 230.

Significant Facts of Bible History

In the light of all this, how meaningful, therefore, are the following facts of Bible history:

1. God established the memorial of creation at the very beginning of the history of the world. The sanctifying of the Sabbath occurred on the seventh day of the first week of time.

2. Apostasy and degeneracy began when man failed to see beyond creation to the Creator. As Paul vividly declares in the first chapter of Romans, men would not retain God in their memory; they served the creature more than the Creator. Man would not worship the true God but turned instead to idol worship, with consequent spiritual and moral pollution.

3. God declared that the Sabbath was to be kept by Israel as a sign "that you may know that 1 am the Lord that cloth sanctify you." The Sabbath was to be "a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed." Ex. 31:13, 17. The Sabbath was a sign of the creative power of God, a sign of a personal relationship between God and man, a sign of the purity and holiness and perfection that distinguish God and all His acts. Hence the Sabbath was ever to be a sign to the children of Israel that the God whom they worshiped had lifted them above the pit of moral corruption into which the heathen round about them had fallen, that He had power to create in them clean hearts and make them new creatures.

The history of Israel as set forth, foe example, by Ezekiel shows that they failed to keep holy God's Sabbath day as He had commanded. The record declares: "They ... polluted my Sabbaths: for their heart went after their idols." Eze. 20:16. The pollution of the Sabbath, that is, the failure to remember it and thus the failure to remember the true God memorialized by it, was directly related to the evil of turning to idol worship. In other words, they could not turn to idol worship without profaning the Sabbath. The Sabbath stood ever as a barrier against idolatry. The Israelite who kept the Sabbath of God provided for all men a sign that he had no part in pagan idolatry. The fearful record of man's degeneracy, as set forth in the opening chapter of the book of Romans, would never have had to be written if men had remembered always God's holy Sabbath day which He sanctified at the end of creation week.

Facts of Post-Biblical History

In view of the great significance of creation to a true conception of Scriptural doctrines, how meaningful, also, are the following facts of post-Biblical history:

1. The rise of the mystery of iniquity in the early centuries of the Christian Era was paralleled by the decline of the Bible Sabbath. There was no one cause for the decline. Nor will church

historians ever be able to agree on the relative importance of all the forces that served to bring the Sabbath into eclipse. But in the setting of the facts already presented and others to be set forth, it is proper to conclude that there is a direct relationship between the rise of the apostasy and the decline of the Sabbath.

2. The mystical allegorizing of the early church Fathers spiritualized away the Sabbath. They talked of a new day that was to commemorate a new event, the resurrection.

3. The thin line of Sabbath keepers through the Dark Ages was uniformly found in the ranks of Rome's opponents.

4. The decline of God's holy Sabbath day was followed by the rise of numerous holy days for saints. This is understandable. Holy days are ever the symbols of a religion, its rallying points in terms of time.

Facts of Reformation Days and Onward

Consider, next, the significance of these historical facts of Reformation times and onward: 1. Luther and Calvin quite largely discarded the saints' days and other annual holy days because they viewed these as marks of Rome's power and apostasy. In fact, the Reformers swung so far in their first fervor over the liberty of the gospel as to question the need of keeping even a weekly holy day. Calvin declared that he could go out and bowl on the green on Sunday to show his liberty in the gospel.

2. The fact, however, that these great Reformers failed to emphasize as clearly as they might the spiritual significance of a weekly holy day resulted erelong in a lax keeping of Sunday on the Continent.

3. Puritans in England in the seventeenth century sought to purify the Church of England. They saw the laxity on the Continent in regard to Sunday. They concluded that Christians needed set times for worship if strong and consistent Christian lives were to be developed. They also realized that Sunday could not make a claim on the Christian conscience without a "Thus says the Lord." Hence they sought to place Sunday squarely on the fourth commandment of the Ten Commandments. They succeeded in doing this by spiritualizing away the literal, exact meaning of the phrase "the seventh day" and declaring that it meant simply one day in seven. That interpretation was woven into the Westminster Confession in AD. 1647 and thus into the thinking of much of Protestantism, for the Westminster Confession is probably more widely known than any other of the great Reformation creeds. (See chapter 7)

Old and New Creation

Sunday keeping theologians have not been wholly blind to the fact that the Sabbath command was specifically instituted to memorialize the historical creation recorded in Genesis. Hence, these theologians have often sought to give consistency to their belief by declaring that the seventh day of the week memorializes the "old creation," and that the first day of the week memorializes the "new creation," the re-creation in Christ Jesus.

However, there have been theologians frank enough to admit that Sunday fails to measure up fully in this matter of a memorial of creation. In a noted commentary prepared by the Church of England is found this comment on Exodus 20:8:

"The day [Sunday] which we observe, in accordance with ecclesiastical usage, holds another place in the week [than the Sabbath] and its connection with the creation of the world has thus been put into the background." - Holy Bible With Commentary.

But in spite of a damaging admission like this, the advocates of Sunday have generally sought to make Sunday appear as though it stood on the solid ground of the Sabbath command. In reality it has ever rested on a foundation of sand, the shifting sands of spiritualizing interpretation. And like a house built on the sand, it looked as solid as though on rock, until the storm came. Or to speak literally: The plausible proponents of Sunday as a memorial of the "new creation" did not realize, in the days before Darwin, how completely the "new creation" is dependent on the "old creation" for its significance. The only sure foundation of the new creation" is the "old creation," the one recorded in Genesis. The same is true of all other doctrines, as we have already discovered.

When the winds of the evolution theory began to blow in the last half of the nineteenth century, churchmen were not braced against the storm by any sure footing on the weekly memorial of the creation of the world. The Bible Sabbath they had relegated to a bygone day. They thought they had greatly improved on the simple Ten Commandments command to keep a particular day in memory of a particular event. Most of them thought they had given an all-sufficient reason for their change by declaring that the original Sabbath was Jewish, as though there could be anything Jewish about the Garden of Eden, where the Sabbath was instituted, or Adam and Eve, to whom the Sabbath was given, or the seventh day of the week, which was the time set apart. Ah, they had something more modern, a new Sabbath to honor a "new creation." Though they did not realize it, those who led out in promoting this view in the early days of Protestantism were the original Modernists in Protestant ranks. The practical effect of their exalting the first day of the week in honor of the resurrection of Christ was that the creation of the world inevitably seemed of relatively small importance. It was simply the "old creation."

Not only were churchmen not prepared to meet the evolution storm, they were actually conditioned to accept evolution, even though it contradicted the clearest statements of Genesis and other portions of the Bible. Whatever consciousness churchmen might have had of the importance of the literal creation, as recorded in Genesis, was dulled and blunted because the memorial of that creation, the seventh day Sabbath, was not remembered. This blunted sense, coupled with the practice of spiritualizing away the literal meaning of Scripture, provides the chief reason why churchmen found themselves quite unconsciously susceptible to the claims of the evolution theory. As we have already learned, they had spiritualized away the literal statements of Holy Writ regarding the Second Advent. They had declared that the resurrection that accompanies the Advent was simply a rising from spiritual death of those dead in trespasses and sins. As regards the Sabbath, which stands in opposition to evolution, they had spiritualized away the definite seventh day and the definite historical creation, so as to make the fourth commandment actually appear to enjoin a new day in honor of a new event.

Long Days of Genesis

Paralleling this, though not directly related, was the interpretation that was given by some churchmen to the word day in the creation record of Genesis. By simplest definition and by the quite unanimous agreement of Bible students through all the centuries, the word day there used means a literal day, a twenty four-hour period. But one after another of Protestant divines, even before Darwin's time, began to declare that these creation days were long periods of time. When Darwin arose, this played into his hands, for time was what the evolution theory needed more than all else if it was to be viewed as even plausible. Indeed, if creation week was really the sum of seven long periods of time, what should hinder men from believing that almost any kind of slow transition of life forms might have occurred? What is more, if the concise Genesis record of that first week is expanded to countless ages, we are only one step removed from believing that Genesis is not really presenting accurate history, but only a symbolical summary of vast changes that have taken place in our earth over an interminably long and shadowy past.

Even before Darwin's day all these spiritualizing tendencies in relation to creation and the Sabbath it memorialized played a part in making churchmen susceptible to the higher critical theories of the Bible, which began to spread their baleful influence over Christian minds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Central to the higher critical theory was the claim that the books of Moses were not strictly historical, that the early records of man's life on earth are hopelessly mixed with folklore and myth.

For these and other reasons that might be given, the evolution theory gained rapid acceptance in Protestant circles. A Bible undermined by spiritualizing methods, by higher critical arguments, and by the skeptical scientific theories dominant as the nineteenth century closed, left the way fully open for a brazenly new theology. This new theology, as earlier described, climaxed in a bold attack on the central idea of a personal God. The point of departure of Modernism, it can never be too often stated, is the foundation chapters of the Bible, the creation record. When Protestant Christendom finally split asunder a few decades ago, the cleavage ran all the way back to the first chapter of the Bible, back to the beginning of the world. That cleavage presents us today with a large and steadily increasing group called Modernists, who control most church organizations. On the other hand is a group, who for lack of a more exact word may still be described as Fundamentalists, who are generally on the defensive, and are declining in numbers.

Third Angel Fittingly Follows First and Second

In the setting of these facts, let us turn ' directly to the question of the preaching of the third angel's message. Both Darwinism and the Advent movement developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Could any message be more timely or logical as a climax to the first and second angels' messages than this third one that warns men against the keeping of a false day and by clear implication calls upon them to keep God's true day, the memorial of creation?

In the 1850's, when the third angel's message began to be definitely preached, it was impossible for the pioneers to see the full import of the message. They were not prophets. They could not foresee the vast changes that were to take place in the secular and religious world in the century that lay ahead. Hence, they preached the Sabbath largely in terms of the time factor. They stressed fervently the highly pertinent and Scriptural fact that the seventh, and not the first, day is God's Sabbath. Hence, their preaching on the Sabbath was often distinguished by an extended

discussion of the meaning of the law, the perpetuity of it, and, of course, their preaching included, and rightly so, a vigorous denunciation of Sunday as a mark of apostasy.

Now the servant of the Lord, early in the history of this Advent movement, forecast that the time would come when the Sabbath would be preached more fully. It is no distortion of her words to say that they meant not only the preaching of the Sabbath over a wider area but preaching the Sabbath in greater fullness of meaning. The time has conic for such preaching.

How To Preach The Sabbath More Fully

And how shall the Sabbath be preached in greater fullness? By preaching the Sabbath more fully in terms of its purpose, that is, its purpose as a memorial of creation.

This means no minimizing of the significance of time, of the fact that the Sabbath is the seventh day. But the factor of time is the basis of the real reason for the Sabbath-the seventh day is the Sabbath because it is that day that serves with true historical accuracy as the memorial of creation. God designated a particular day, not arbitrarily, but because it is integral to the historical fact that He wished to memorialize.

We as Adventists believe fully that time subserves purpose in the Sabbath command, but in actual practice and preaching we often fail to stress as we should the purpose of the Sabbath, that it is a memorial of creation. If we refer to the creation feature of the command we too often deal with it in the negative, that is, that Sunday is not the true Sabbath because it is not a true memorial of creation. That argument is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. It does not set forth the Sabbath commandment with all the force and significance with which it ought to he set forth in these days when the creation record in Genesis is the point of departure for the whole modern apostasy in Christendom.

The pioneers may be pardoned for not stressing fully the creation feature of the command, but there is no excuse for our not doing so. If we are to proclaim the Sabbath more fully we must see its full significance, that is, we must see it in the setting of conditions in the world today. Only thus will we truly have present truth for the world. We should never forget that all three messages of the angels were given to meet specific conditions at a specific time in the history of the world.

It is when we see the Sabbath in the setting of the modern apostasy that we can best understand the unique status of Adventists in the religious world. This Advent movement is the only religious body with a message that directly meets the key heresy of our age, the evolution theory, and calls on all who wish to come out of Babylon, out of apostasy, to accept the true sign of allegiance to the living God, the Creator. We stand revealed today as calling on men to join with us not simply in a technical dispute over the seventh or the first day of the week or to keep another day just to be different. We call on men to keep the Sabbath as a sign of allegiance to the Creator of the heavens and the earth, as a badge of loyalty to the great truths of revelation, all of which rest on the opening chapters of the Bible.

Yes, we stand unique today in the religious world. Fundamentalists, despite their devotion to Scripture and their loyalty and love toward their Lord, do not have the defense against evolution that we have, nor are they prepared to rally men and women to a great sign of allegiance to the

true God as Seventh day Adventists can. In many instances Fundamentalists hold to the long- ages view of creation days, which plays directly into the hands of the evolution theory. So, far from having a Sabbath command to set in opposition to evolution, they have actually sought to eliminate the Sabbath command from the Ten Commandments, while inconsistently holding that the remaining nine are binding. Yet it is the Sabbath command that reveals the Author of the law and gives to that law its binding authority.

More than any others, Fundamentalists, as we have noted, speak fervently of Sunday as a memorial of the "new creation," and claim that it is a vast improvement over what they call the "old creation." But they do not seem to realize that this "new creation" has no meaning without the "old." When Modernists rejected the Genesis record of creation, it was not long before the birth, death, resurrection, and ministry of our Lord became meaningless. When the foundation was removed, the superstructure collapsed. Fundamentalists are in the strange position of concentrating on the superstructure and minimizing the importance of the foundation.

Fundamentalists speak fervently of a personal God and of creation. In full sincerity they deplore evolutionary attacks on the Bible. They mourn the split in the churches, a result of evolution. Yet they turn about and denounce the seventh day Sabbath that is the symbol of creation, the constant reminder of it and of a personal God, and thus of an authoritative Bible. They have only scathing denunciation for the one religious body, Seventh day Adventists, that is wholly free of the evolution heresy. And that denunciation focuses on our distinctive Sabbath doctrine, which is our weekly protest against evolution, our weekly means of keeping fresh in our minds the fact that in six days the Lord created the heavens and the earth.

Call Men Back to Bible

In calling men back to the Bible Sabbath we call them back to the authority of the Bible in opposition to (1) the authority of reason, which gives proof of its claims in the marvels of the scientific age, and. (2) the authority of Rome, which gives Sunday as proof of its claims.

What men crave more than anything else is a note of authority in their spiritual lives. Our present age is distinguished by doubt and uncertainty. Man needs something beyond himself. Reason, despite its marvelous results in scientific discovery, does not satisfy in the spiritual realm. In fact, its deficiency is most evident in these postwar days, which dazzle us with scientific findings. Thus there are really only two claims on men's spiritual allegiance at this time-the claims of Rome and the claims of the Bible.

It is a remarkable fact that in these present times no small number of intellectuals have become converts to Rome, hoping to find in her a spiritual haven. Thus is fulfilled the remarkable statement written by Mrs. White in 1888. We quote in part her prophetic words:

"A day of great intellectual darkness has been shown to be favorable to the success of the papacy. It will yet be demonstrated that a day of great intellectual light is equally favorable for its success. In past ages, when men were without God's word, and without the knowledge of the truth, their eyes were blindfolded, and thousands were ensnared, not seeing the net spread for their feet. In this generation there are many whose eyes become dazzled by the glare of human speculations, 'science falsely so called,' they discern not the net, and walk into it as readily as if

blindfolded. God designed that man's intellectual powers should be held as a gift from his Maker, and should be employed in the service of truth and righteousness; but when pride and ambition are cherished, and men exalt their own theories above the word of God, then intelligence can accomplish greater harm than ignorance. Thus the false science of the present day, which undermines faith in the Bible, will prove as successful in preparing the way for the acceptance of the papacy, with its pleasing forms, as did the withholding of knowledge in opening the way for its aggrandizement in the Dark Ages.".-The Great Controversy, pp. 572, 573.

We stand forth today as a people who believe in the Bible, the whole Bible, without any spiritualizing of its literal words. We believe in the Bible from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation. We believe in the whole of the moral law of God and in the Sabbath command, which gives binding authority to the law. We believe in the Sabbath as the memorial of the direct relationship of a personal, moral God to this world of ours, a relationship so direct that man was made In the divine image and likeness. We keep God's holy Sabbath day because we believe literally in the historical record of the Bible from the very first chapter onward. We see in the Sabbath a bulwark against the modern apostasy in Christendom that undermines the authority of the Bible, by undermining its foundations.

Surely the time has come for us to arise and proclaim the Sabbath more fully, to see the Sabbath not only in the awesome setting of Sinai but also in the perfect setting of Eden. The Sabbath is not merely a question of days but a question of belief or disbelief in the foundation truths on which the whole Scriptures of God rest. It is for us to build up the foundations of many generations.