Safeguarding the New Experience
117
Peril of Confusing the Spirit’s Work with Fanaticism
There have been things written to me in regard to the movings
of the Spirit of God at the last conference [1893], and at the college,
which clearly indicate that because these blessings were not lived up
to, minds have been confused, and that which was light from heaven
has been called excitement. I have been made sad to have this matter
viewed in this light. We must be very careful not to grieve the Holy
Spirit of God, in pronouncing the ministration of His Holy Spirit a
species of fanaticism. How shall we understand the workings of the
Spirit of God if it was not revealed in clear and unmistakable lines, not
only in Battle Creek but in many places?
I am not surprised that anyone should be confused at the after
result. But in my experience of the past forty-nine years I have seen
much of these things, and I have known that God has wrought in a
marked manner; and let no one venture to say this is not the Spirit of
God. It is just that which we are authorized to believe and pray for,
for God is more willing to give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him
than parents are to give good gifts unto their children. But the Holy
Spirit is not for the human agent to work; it is to work and use the
human agent. That God did abundantly bless the students in the school
and the church, I have not one doubt; but a period of great light and
the outpouring of the Spirit is quite generally followed by a time of
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great darkness. Why? Because the enemy works with all his deceiving
energies to make of none effect the deep movings of the Spirit of God
on the human subject.
When the students at the school went into their match games and
football playing, when they became absorbed in the amusement ques-
tion, Satan saw it a good time to step in and make of none effect the
Holy Spirit of God in molding and using the human subject. Had the
teachers to a man done their duty, had they realized their accountabil-
ity, had they stood in moral independence before God, had they used
the ability which God had given them according to the sanctification
of the spirit through the love of the truth, they would have had spiritual
strength and divine enlightenment to press on and on and upward on
the ladder of progress reaching heavenward. The fact is evident that
they did not appreciate or walk in the light or follow the Light of the
world.