(4-5) This fits Dr. Carter’s case exactly. He admits that he no longer believes the fundamenta] teachings of the Presbyterian church, and that he no longer believes the fundamental teachings of the Bible respecting sin and its atonement, etc. He is a heretic, therefore, not only to the Presbyterian church but also, and more important by far, he is a heretic toward God and “the church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven.” But Dr. Carter’s fears were groundless: Nassau Presbytery by a good majority decided that to brand him a “heretic” would be to brand the Presbytery the same. To say that Dr. Carter had been acting the hypocrite for years would be to charge themselves with the same dishonesty. So Dr. Carter’s practical endorsement by Nassau Presbytery (one of the most influential in the land) must be understood by thinking people to mean that Nassau Presbytery is either totally or by majority composed of heretics who do not stand for the fundamentals of religion, neither as expressed in the Bible, God’s standard, nor as expressed in the Presbyterian Confession of Faith, which they have vowed to uphold and teach. IS AN ATHEIST A HERETIC? Dr. Lyman Abbott’s pronunciamento has been published broadcast, but we give a liberal extract from it from the Pittsbuig Dispatch, as follows:— CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 18.—Leaning for out over the pulpit in Appleton Chapel, his long white beard and flowing gown making him look like a veritable patriarch, Dr. Lyman Abbott, in a sermon to Harvard students tonight, broke away from the theology which today forms the basis of the faith of millions of orthodox Christians, and sounded the keynote of a new religion founded, not on the Bible, but on science and the outreachings of the human heart. “I wonder,” he said, “if you students in Harvard will understand me when I say that I no longer believe in a great first cause. Tomorrow the newspapers will get hold of this and brand me as a@ heretic. My God is a great and ever-present force, which is manifest in all the activities of man and all the workings of nature. “I believe in a God who is in, and through, and of, everything—not an absentee God, whom we have to reach through a Bible or a priest or some other outside aid. Science, literature and history tell us that there is one eternal energy, that the Bible no longer can be accepted as ultimate, that many of its laws were copied from other religions, that the Ten Commandments did not spring spontaneously from Moses, but were, like all laws, a gradual growth, and that man is a creature, not a creation.” * * * If we grasp Dr. Abbott’s language it means, what all atheists hold, that there is no God, that in some unexplainable sense all nature ig God, and that we are all the children of nature, God, by evolution. Voltaire, Thos. Paine, and Robert Ingersoll never did such slight to justice and religion as this. They were too honest to wear a cloak of religion to conceal the poisoned dagger of infidelity for a close approach to permit spiritual assassination. Oh shame, shame! That a greyhaired man should wear the livery of a Christian minister, and the decorations of “Reverend” and of “Doctor of Divinity” to maintain his honor among men, and then, stealing into the Christian Chapel of one of the foremost colleges of the world, should seek to assassinate the Bible and its God and Christ, and to put the poison of infidelity into the streams of culture where they would be most effective in poisoning the entire household of faith! Dr. Abbott, also, is afraid he will be found out as a “heretic,” but—wiser on the subject than Dr. Carter—he does not anticipate trouble from the ministry, who he well knows are generally “tarred with the same stick,”—-he fears that the newspapers will find him out. He is still more shrewd, for knowing that the newspapers would discern his heresy he doubtless wrote out the newspaper statement above with his own pen! Why? To deceive! To give the impression—this is not heresy, but the newspapers will know no better than to consider it so. What abominable hypocrisy in the name of Christianity! And yet at one time in our estimation Dr. Abbott was one of God’s most sincere servants: we judge from his writings of thirty years ago. Verily a star, a bright one, is thus seen to have “fallen from heaven.” Surely we are witnessing the masterstrokes of Satanic craft as no time since the dark ages witnessed them. Then the adversary used ignorance and superstition and priestcraft as his tools: now he transforms himself and poses as an angel of light. Taking advantage of the recoil of civilization against the monstrous and unscriptural errors of the past, he takes the torch of higher criticism and becomes leader, that he may attract attention to the opposite extreme—equally far from the truth. ZION’S WATCH TOWER ALLEGHENY, Pa, But we are neither surprised nor dismayed by such “falling of the stars from heaven,” and the consequent “shaking” of the foundations of society as respects religious things. No; the Master foretold it all, and, as our older readers well know, we have been expecting these things for thirty years, and noting their gradual approach. So far as the Lord’s cause is concerned we would not even change matters; for although it will soon produce demoralization in nominal Christendom, it will result to the advantage of the Lord’s true people, “Israelites indeed.” We are in the “harvest” of the Gospel age, and while “wheat” and “tares’” have grown together in the past, the Lord is seeing to it that now they must be manifested as totally different, that the “wheat” may all be reaped with the sickle of truth and he gathered into the heavenly “garner.” In proportion as the eyes of our understanding open and we see these things, we may indeed lift up our heads and rejoice, knowing that our deliverance draweth near! HIGHER CRITICISM AFFECTING ROMANISM It would appear that Romanism also is seriously affected by “modern scholarship,” otherwise “higher criticism” or refined infidelity. Papacy’s claim of Infallibility makes her specially vulnerable. The following from the higher critical viewpoint appeared in the Fortmghtly Review: “The conclusion—painful as it is—that one is compelled to draw is that Rome regards the maintenance of her absolute authority, unlimited in its sphere and exercise, as the one thing to be fought for at all costs, even at the cost of the loss to the church of the great majority of her children. This is the spirit, and this the tempter, which brought about the Reformation; it does not spring from ‘ineradicable confidence’ in the future of the church, but rather from a well-grounded fear that the claim of Rome to absolute, infallible, and unlimited authority in all matters will not stand the test of history, and can not be maintained except by the rigorous repression of individual initiative and independent thought. “The position in which the individual Catholic is placed by the policy of his rulers is one of grave difficulty, and nowhere is the situation more acute than in France. In the English Catholic body few of the laity, and fewer still of the clergy, take any interest in intellectual matters; but there are signs of grave mischief among the younger laymen even in England. They have been trained to draw no distinction between the Catholic faith and its scholastic expression, or the insecure historical basis upon which their teachers have founded it. “The natural consequence is that, in so far as those who have been educated in this way become convinced of the strength of the critical position, their hold on the faith is likely to be weakened. Rome has weakened it still more by declaring that any attempt to find a synthesis between the critical position and the faith is unlawful for Catholics.” * But Rome will not be as much shaken as Protestantism in this respect. She has her grip upon the people through priestcraft and superstition, and it will hold to the “bitter end,” when anarchy will down all. Meantime it will be all the more trying upon intelligent Protestant Christians, loyal to the Bible, to find the great Antichrist system on their side, defending the Bible, with all the “worldly wise” in opposition. The Lord, however, knows how to sift and shake his professed church so as to gather out of it all things that offend and they that do iniquity. LACK OF CANDIDATES FOR MINISTRY Two conventions of Christian workers have been held recently to consider the dearth of Ministerial candidates. The Wor.p’s Work says on the subject :— “There is no real ‘dearth’ of students for the ministry, There is a slight back-set at the present time, but it is not so great as has occurred in other years, and reports of attendance of students in the theological seminaries, when compared with similar reports twenty-five years ago, show a marked and marvelous increase, “In some quarters there is a determination in the quality of students, but the reports are not altogether unanimous. Methodists and Episcopalians report a decided increase in numbers and in quality, and other religious bodies vary in localities and colleges in this respect. “There is a marked change in the sources of supply. The West and South provide a much larger proportion of students than the East. The response is greater in the newer regions than in the old, in the country than in the city, in the small churches than in the larger.” * * * Tt would seem, however, that there is a danger even more serious than that resulting from a lack of proper candidates for the ministry. Mr. Tomlinson wrote to twenty “successful pas [3480]
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