BY GEORGE B. THOMPSON
(Wilkie Aill, 111.)
REFORMERS in every age who have been called of God to combat and expose the errors of their day, have always been confronted with the argument of custom. Children look through the spectacles of their fathers, and are loath to think that they may have been in error. The woman at the well of Samaria appealed to “our father Jacob,” and to expose the traditions of that age was part of the work of Christ.
Long-established precedents are often cited in proof that their practices are right, and those whose duty it is to raise their voices against these long established customs, are many times sneered at and branded as fanatics or alarmists. When the lion-hearted Luther started out to expose the corruptions of popery, he met the same opposition. When the brawling .Dr. Eck met him in debate, and was ground beneath his thunder-bolts of truth, he sneeringly said:—
I am surprised at the humility and modesty with which the reverend doctor undertakes to oppose, alone, so many illustrious Fathers, and pretends to know more than the sovereign pontiffs, the councils, the doctors, and the universities? It would be surprising, no doubt, if God had hidden the truth from so many saints and martyrs—until the advent of the reverend father.”— D’Aubigne’s History of the Reformation, vol. 2, p. 56.
To accept custom as always correct is to stop the sun of progress in the heavens; and experience mental and moral stagnation. It is only to reiterate in another form the pagan maxim, “Whatever is, is right.” Custom is often wrong, and hoary hairs can never make truth out of a falsehood. “A lie on the throne is a lie still.” Age can never make good that which in itself is bad. Satan is quite old, but he is Satan still, possessing the same diabolical subtlety as when in Eden. The questions with Christians should not be, Does a practice exist, but, By what right does it exist? The query should be, Who ordained it? Sun-worship can be traced back into the days of ancient Egypt, and the ancestors of Abraham were idolaters; but sun-worship and idolatry are wrong. Many, if not all, of the errors which are found in the ecclesiastical “craze” of the present time, find a lineage amid the superstitious orgies of popery, and many who adhere to those erroneous dogmas, cite as a warrant the practices of the “Christian Fathers.” But neither their age nor parentage entitle them to credence. Why do they exist? Did God establish them? If not, man did, and a religious practice having for its basis a precept of man, even though he be a pope, is a vain worship. The “Bible and the Bible alone” is the rule of the Protestant faith. When it speaks, we can speak, and when it is silent, we must be also.
The conflict between truth and error has been long, and the lines of the conflict have been sharply drawn. While in every battle, truth has been victorious, its heavenly beauty has become tarnished, and its immaculate purity many times destroyed through the weakness of mortals. Says Gibbon :—
The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing religion as she descended from heaven arrayed in her native purity; a more melancholy duty is imposed upon the historian: he must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in long residence upon earth among a weak and degenerate race of beings.
For this reason it becomes unsafe to appeal to existing customs as a guide. To do so is but to step back into that antiquated gloom which covered the world with the pall of midnight; when the “Mystery of Iniquity” sought to make Christianity—so-called—popular by mixing in heathen errors, and to accept as truth the writings of monks rather than the pure word of God. The word of God is pre-eminently “the truth.” It is the words of him who “spoke as never man spoke.” By it all opinions and creeds must be tested, and anything deviating in the minute, particular from its plain utterances, is shown to be spurious. “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”
The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, September 22, 1891