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The Great Controversy 1888
be saved by their merits, and those who would be saved in their sins.
Here is the secret of its power.
A day of great intellectual darkness has been shown to be favorable
to the success of popery. It will yet be demonstrated that a day of great
intellectual light is equally favorable for its success. In past ages,
when men were without God’s Word, and without the knowledge of
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the truth, their eyes were blindfolded, and thousands were ensnared,
not seeing the net spread for their feet. In this generation there are
many whose eyes become dazzled by the glare of human speculations,
“science falsely so-called;” they discern not the net, and walk into it as
readily as if blindfolded. God designed that man’s intellectual powers
should be held as a gift from his Maker, and should be employed in the
service of truth and righteousness; but when pride and ambition are
cherished, and men exalt their own theories above the Word of God,
then intelligence can accomplish greater harm than ignorance. Thus
the false science of the nineteenth century, which undermines faith in
the Bible, will prove as successful in preparing the way for the accep-
tance of the papacy, with its pleasing forms, as did the withholding
of knowledge in opening the way for its aggrandizement in the Dark
Ages.
In the movements now in progress in the United States to secure
for the institutions and usages of the church the support of the State,
Protestants are following in the steps of papists. [
See Appendix, Note
11.
] Nay, more, they are opening the door for popery to regain in
Protestant America the supremacy which she has lost in the Old World.
And that which gives greater significance to this movement is the fact
that the principal object contemplated is the enforcement of Sunday
observance,—a custom which originated with Rome, and which she
claims as the sign of her authority. It is the spirit of the papacy,—the
spirit of conformity to worldly customs, the veneration for human
traditions above the commandments of God,—that is permeating the
Protestant churches, and leading them on to do the same work of
Sunday exaltation which the papacy has done before them.
If the reader would understand the agencies to be employed in the
soon-coming contest, he has but to trace the record of the means which
Rome employed for the same object in ages past. If he would know
how papists and Protestants united will deal with those who reject
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