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Testimonies for the Church Volume 1
The weight and responsibility of this work lead to great carefulness,
cause sleepless nights, and call forth earnest, fervent, agonizing prayer
to God. The Lord has led my husband forward to take one responsible
position after another. Censure from his brethren wrings his soul with
anguish, yet he must not falter in the work. Fellow laborers having an
appearance of godliness oppose every advance which God leads him to
make, and his precious time must be occupied in traveling from place to
place, laboring with distress of mind among the churches to undo what
these professed brethren have been doing. Poor mortals! They mistake
matters; they have not a true sense of what constitutes a Christian.
Those who have been thrust out to bear a plain, pointed testimony, in
the fear of God to reprove wrong, to labor with all their energies to
build up God’s people, and to establish them upon important points
of present truth, have too often received censure instead of sympathy
and help, while those who, like yourself, have taken a noncommittal
position, are thought to be devoted, and to have a mild spirit. God
does not thus regard them. The forerunner of Christ’s first advent was
a very plain-spoken man. He rebuked sin, and called things by their
right names. He laid the ax at the root of the tree. He thus addressed
one class of professed converts who came to be baptized of him in
Jordan: “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from
the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance....
And now also the ax is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every
tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into
the fire.”
In this fearful time, just before Christ is to come the second time,
God’s faithful preachers will have to bear a still more pointed testimony
than was borne by John the Baptist. A responsible, important work
is before them; and those who speak smooth things, God will not
acknowledge as His shepherds. A fearful woe is upon them.
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This strange fanaticism in Wisconsin grew out of the false theory of
holiness, advocated by Brother K—a holiness not dependent upon the
third angel’s message, but outside of present truth. Sister G received
this false theory from him, carried it out herself, and zealously taught
it to others. This nearly destroyed her love for the sacred, important
truths for this time, which, if she had loved and obeyed, would have
proved an anchor to hold her upon the right foundation. But she, with
many others, made this theory of holiness or consecration the one