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her turn she exerts a corrupting influence upon the world by teaching
doctrines which are opposed to the plainest statements of Holy Writ.
Rome withheld the Bible from the people and required all men to
accept her teachings in its place. It was the work of the Reformation
to restore to men the word of God; but is it not too true that in the
churches of our time men are taught to rest their faith upon their creed
and the teachings of their church rather than on the Scriptures? Said
Charles Beecher, speaking of the Protestant churches: “They shrink
from any rude word against creeds with the same sensitiveness with
which those holy fathers would have shrunk from a rude word against
the rising veneration of saints and martyrs which they were fostering....
The Protestant evangelical denominations have so tied up one another’s
hands, and their own, that, between them all, a man cannot become a
preacher at all, anywhere, without accepting some book besides the
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Bible.... There is nothing imaginary in the statement that the creed
power is now beginning to prohibit the Bible as really as Rome did,
though in a subtler way.”—Sermon on “The Bible a Sufficient Creed,”
delivered at Fort Wayne, Indiana, Feb. 22, 1846.
When faithful teachers expound the word of God, there arise men
of learning, ministers professing to understand the Scriptures, who
denounce sound doctrine as heresy, and thus turn away inquirers after
truth. Were it not that the world is hopelessly intoxicated with the
wine of Babylon, multitudes would be convicted and converted by the
plain, cutting truths of the word of God. But religious faith appears so
confused and discordant that the people know not what to believe as
truth. The sin of the world’s impenitence lies at the door of the church.
The second angel’s message of
Revelation 14
was first preached in
the summer of 1844, and it then had a more direct application to the
churches of the United States, where the warning of the judgment had
been most widely proclaimed and most generally rejected, and where
the declension in the churches had been most rapid. But the message
of the second angel did not reach its complete fulfillment in 1844. The
churches then experienced a moral fall, in consequence of their refusal
of the light of the advent message; but that fall was not complete. As
they have continued to reject the special truths for this time they have
fallen lower and lower. Not yet, however, can it be said that “Babylon
is fallen,... because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath
of her fornication.” She has not yet made all nations do this. The spirit