| CHAPTER III.
SEEKING LIGHT. Almost before I was aware of it I found myself withdrawing from my friends and companions of other days. I was beginning to view life in a different way. I began to thirst after knowledge, and awoke to the fact that those things that I had given my time and study to were of little real value to me. I asked for and obtained The Voice of Warning. This little book gave me more light with reference to God, his word, the condition of the religious world, and my own position before my Creator, than all the books combined that I had ever read before. The reader may conclude from this statement that I had not read the Bible. Well, I must confess that the Bible was very seldom found in my hands; in fact I had very little respect for it. My reasons for disrespecting it were these: I had read Fox’s Book of Martyrs, Lives of the British Reformers, and other works showing forth the cruel work perpetrated in the name of Christianity by the Roman Catholic priesthood, who laid sole claim to the right of preaching Christianity and interpreting the Bible. I had read Cobbet’s Protestant Reformation, and Cobbet’s Legacy to Parsons, and other works proving many of the Protestant reformers and leading lights, both ecclesiastical and kingly, with the [35] Bible in one hand and sword in the other, were guilty of the murder of hundreds of Roman Catholics. As a closing sentence regarding the Roman Catholic tribunal of opinion, I submit the following from Buck’s Theological Dictionary, article, “Persecutions”: Fifteen million are said to have been sacrificed to the genius of popery in about forty years. It has been computed that fifty million of Protestants have at different times been the victims of the persecutions of the papists, and put to death for their religious opinions. Buck quotes from fourteen different authors, whose names and book titles appear at the close of his articles. The time came when, in many parts of Europe, the Reformation became popular, and forgetful of the struggles through which they had passed, they followed in the wake of their mother, Rome, and did the works of darkness like unto those that she performed, and we are informed by the Catholic historian, that the followers of Calvin alone burned over twenty thousand Roman churches and killed thousands of priests. We are further informed by the Protestant historian, Cobbett, that it was death for a Catholic priest to come into England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. I had for companions some who had read The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. I had heard them talk against the Bible, and quote from this book in support of their position. I had also heard father ask preachers questions concerning different pas [36] sages found in the Bible, to which the ministers would give some reply such as: “It is not for you to understand”; “That is done away”; “This is not for us to enjoy in these days”; “We are not to understand it in the way it reads,” etc., etc. Remarks such as these from those I thought ought to know what the teachings of the Bible were disturbed me, and I was led to think that that book was the cause of all the blood-curdling and heart rending scenes of the Catholic and Protestant wars. And last, but not least, if, as the preachers said, “The Bible is a book that can not be understood literally, that only the educated could arrive at the proper meaning, and that by putting a spiritual interpretation upon it,” why, I was neither educated nor spiritual, hence it contained no message for me. Those were some of my reasons for disrespecting the Bible. But when I read The Voice of Warning, published by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I discovered that the Bible was quite a different book from what I had thought it was. I learned that all the prophecies which have been fulfilled, have been literally fulfilled, and that the prophecies that have not yet met with fulfillment, will be fulfilled in the due time of God, and that liter ally; that the doctrine taught by Christ should be presented to the world now just as he preached it eighteen centuries ago; that whenever God had a people who were accepted of him they always obeyed the same perfect law which was known as the gospel or doctrine of Christ, and believed in the same [37] kind of church organization, and sought for and enjoyed the spiritual blessings promised in the Bible; that God was unchangeable, and hence if he had a church on the earth at the present time, the same law, doctrine, organization, and spiritual blessings which were taught, obeyed, believed in, and enjoyed when Christ and the apostles were on earth, could be found and enjoyed in that church. I learned, further, that many centuries ago (according to the prophecies of Christ and the apostles of the Old and New Testament), and apostasy had taken place in the church, that soon after the organization of the church the elders and others of the true church lost the Spirit of God and taught false doctrine and introduced many evils into the church. Also that in process of time the true servants of God were destroyed, and evil men, false teachers, false apostles entered into the fold, and everything underwent a change, until the time came that they would not endure sound doctrine; the Spirit of God was taken from the apostate church; church and state joined hands, and evil men and seducers waxed worse and worse, till those who claimed the priest hood forbade all others to read the Bible. Truly this was “a famine for the word of God.” In support of the above I read the confession of such men as the Reverend Father Hogan and Chiniquy (who were both priests of high standing at one time in the Roman Catholic Church), that the mother church was in an apostate condition. The horrible crimes that those men say the Catholic [38] Church is now guilty of, will prove she has apostatized from the pure doctrine the Savior taught. Let us place the confession of the above men with the statement of John Wesley, as made by him in his sermons on the “More Excellent Way.” Note the following extracts: Jn the very first society at Rome, there were “divisions and offenses,” but how early and how powerfully did the mystery of iniquity work in the church at Corinth; not only schisms, heresies, animosities, fierce and bitter contentions, but actual open sins. We meet with abundant proof that in all the churches the tares grew up with the wheat, and that the “mystery of iniquity” did everywhere work in a thousand forms. That grand pest of Christianity—a faith without works—was spread far and wide. When James wrote his epistle, the tares had produced a plentiful harvest. (See second, third, fourth, and fifth chapters.) There was envy, strife, confusion, and every evil work; whoso reads with attention, will be inclined to believe that the tares had well nigh choked the wheat, even at this early period, and that among the most of them, no more than the form of godliness (if so much) was left—John Wesley, sermon 66; subject, “Mystery of Iniquity.” We easily infer what was the state of the church in general from that of the seven churches in Asia; all but Philadelphia and Smyrna were corrupted so that many of them were not a jot better than the present races of Christians; and our Lord then threatened, what he has long since per formed—to remove the candlestick from them. . . . We have been apt to imagine that the primitive church was all excellence and perfection; and such, without doubt, it was on the day of Pentecost, but how soon did the fine gold become dim; how soon was the wine mixed with water; how little time before the Christians were scarcely to be distinguished from the heathens; and if so bad in the first century, we can not suppose it to have been any better in the second; undoubtedly it grew worse and worse. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, in [39] the third century, gives an account of his time. . . . The converts practiced all kinds of abominations, exactly as they did before conversion. . . . A Christian nation, a Christian city (according to the ancient pattern) was no longer to be found. Has the case altered since the Reformation?—John Wesley, sermon 66. This was the real cause why the gifts of the Holy Spirit were no longer to be found in the Christian church; because the Christians were turned heathens again, and had only a dead form left.—John Wesley, sermon 94, in vol. 2. There was also presented to me what I considered as tantamount to a confession by the Church of England that she had no priesthood authority. From the Book of Homilies appointed to be read in the churches in the time of Queen Elizabeth, page 261, I read this extract: Laity and clergy, learned and unlearned, all ages, sects, and degrees of men, women, and children of whole Christendom (a horrible and most dreadful thing to think) have been at once drowned in abominable idolatry, of all other vices most detested of God, and damnable to man, and that by the space of eight hundred years and more. Having heard the elders preach and then reading the Voice of Warning and other papers with the above extracts, and some others which I will not give in this sketch, I concluded that the Latter Day Saints were correct in teaching there had been a complete apostasy from primitive Christianity. [40] |
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