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True Education
Contact With False Teachings
As young people go out into the world to encounter its allure-
ments to sin—the passion for money getting, for amusement and
indulgence, for display, luxury, and extravagance, the overreaching,
fraud, robbery, and ruin—what are the teachings to be met there?
Spiritualism asserts that human beings are unfallen demigods,
that “each mind will judge itself,” “all sins committed are innocent,”
for “whatever is, is right,” and “God does not condemn.” The basest
of human beings are represented as in heaven, and highly exalted
there. Thus it teaches that “It matters not what you do; live as you
please, heaven is your home.” Multitudes are thus led to believe that
desire is the highest law, that license is liberty, and that the members
of the human race are accountable only to themselves.
With such teaching given at the very outset of life, when impulse
is strongest and the demand for self-restraint and purity is most
urgent, where are the safeguards of virtue? What is to prevent the
world from becoming a second Sodom?
At the same time rebellious spirits are seeking to sweep away all
law, both divine and human. The centralizing of wealth and power;
the vast combinations for enriching the few at the expense of the
many; the combinations of the poorer classes for the defense of their
interests and claims; the spirit of unrest, of riot and bloodshed—all
are tending to involve the whole world in a struggle similar to that
which convulsed France in the eighteenth century.
Such are the influences to be met by young people today. To
stand amidst such upheavals they must now lay the foundations of
character.
In every generation and in every land the true foundation and
pattern for character building have been the same. The divine law,
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart; ... and
your neighbor as yourself” (
Luke 10:27
)—the great principle made
manifest in the character and life of our Savior—is the only secure
foundation, the only sure guide.
“Wisdom and knowledge will be the stability of your times”
[139]
(
Isaiah 33:6
, Leeser’s translation)—that wisdom and knowledge
which God’s Word alone can impart.