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110
Early Writings
now and then, they are pressed into the field, to engage in a work
for which God has not qualified them and for which they have not
sufficient experience and judgment. Spiritual pride comes in, they
are lifted up, and act under the deception of thinking that they are
laborers. They do not know themselves. They lack sound judgment
and patient reasoning, talk boastingly of themselves, and assert many
things which they cannot prove from the Word. God knows this;
therefore He does not call such to labor in these perilous times, and
brethren should be careful not to push those out into the field whom
He has not called.
Those men who are not called of God are generally the very ones
that are the most confident that they are so called and that their labors
are very important. They go into the field and do not generally exert
a good influence; yet in some places they have a measure of success,
and this leads them and others to think that they are surely called of
God. It is not a positive evidence that men are called of God because
they have some success; for angels of God are now moving upon the
hearts of His honest children to enlighten their understanding as to
the present truth, that they may lay hold upon it and live. And even
if self-sent men put themselves where God does not put them and
profess to be teachers, and souls receive the truth by hearing them
talk it, this is no evidence that they are called of God. The souls who
receive the truth from them receive it to be brought into trial and
bondage, as they afterward find that these men were not standing in
the counsel of God. Even if wicked men talk the truth, some may
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receive it; but it does not bring those who talked it into any more
favor with God. Wicked men are wicked men still, and according
to the deception they practiced upon those who were beloved of
God, and according to the confusion brought into the church, so will
be their punishment; their sins will not remain covered, but will be
exposed in the day of God’s fierce anger.
These self-sent messengers are a curse to the cause. Honest
souls put confidence in them, thinking that they are moving in the
counsel of God and that they are in union with the church, and
therefore suffer them to administer the ordinances, and, as duty is
made plain that they must do their first works, allow themselves to
be baptized by them. But when light comes, as it surely will, and
they are aware that these men are not what they understood them to