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The Great Controversy 1888
men and women now in active life in our churches were educated,
when children, to make sacrifices in order to be able to give or to do
something for Christ.” But “if funds are wanted now, ... nobody must
be called on to give. Oh, no! have a fair, tableaux, a mock trial, an
antiquarian supper, or something to eat, anything to amuse the people.”
Governor Washburn, of Wisconsin, in his annual message declared
“that church fairs, charitable raffles, concert lotteries for charitable and
other purposes, prize packages, ‘grabbags,’ Sabbath-school and other
religious chances by ticket, are nurseries of crime, inasmuch as they
promise something for nothing, are games of chance, and are really
gambling. He says that the pernicious spirit of gambling is fostered,
encouraged, and kept alive by these agencies to a degree little known
by good citizens; and that, but for them, the ordinary laws against
gambling would be much less violated and much more easily enforced.
These practices, he declares, ought not to be permitted any longer to
debauch the morals of the young.”
The spirit of worldly conformity is invading the churches through-
out Christendom. Robert Atkins, in a sermon preached in London,
draws a dark picture of the spiritual declension that prevails in Eng-
land: “The truly righteous are diminished from the earth, and no man
layeth it to heart. The professors of religion of the present day, in
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every church, are lovers of the world, conformers to the world, lovers
of creature-comfort, and aspirers after respectability. They are called
to suffer with Christ, but they shrink from even reproach. Apostasy,
apostasy, apostasy, is engraven on the very front of every church;
and did they know it, and did they feel it, there might be hope; but,
alas! they cry, ‘We are rich, and increased in goods, and have need of
nothing.’”
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 intoxi-
cation which she presents to the world, represents the false doctrines
that 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
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