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The Spirit of Prophecy Volume 4
mons must not touch popular sins, but be made smooth and pleasing
for fashionable ears. Thus fashionable sinners are enrolled on the
church-records, and fashionable sins are concealed under a pretense
of godliness. God looks down upon these apostate bodies, and de-
clares them daughters of a harlot. To secure the favor and support
of the great men of earth, they have broken their solemn vows of
allegiance and fidelity to the King of Heaven.
The great sin charged against Babylon is, that she “made all
nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.” This
cup of intoxication which she presents to the world, represents the
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false doctrines which she has accepted as the result of her unlawful
connection with the great ones of the earth. Friendship with the
world corrupts her faith, and in her turn she exerts a corrupting
influence upon the world by teaching doctrines which are opposed
to the plainest statements of the word of God.
Prominent among these false doctrines is that of the temporal
millennium,—a thousand years of spiritual peace and prosperity,
in which the world is to be converted, before the coming of Christ.
This siren song has lulled thousands of souls to sleep over the abyss
of eternal ruin.
The doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul has opened the
way for the artful working of Satan through modern Spiritualism;
and besides the Romish errors, purgatory, prayers for the dead,
invocation of saints, etc., which have sprung from this source, it
has led many Protestants to deny the resurrection and the Judgment,
and has given rise to the revolting heresy of eternal torment, and the
dangerous delusion of Universalism.
And even more dangerous and more widely held than these are
the assumptions that the law of God was abolished at the cross,
and that the first day of the week is now a holy day, instead of the
Sabbath of the fourth commandment.
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
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the wine of Babylon, multitudes would be convicted and converted
by the plain, cutting truths of the word of God. The sin of the world’s
impenitence lies at the door of the church.