1912 Watch Tower - A2Z.org

But a man, altruistic in the highest senseand spiritual, will never lose his power.'"* * *--Press Report.It was certainly appropriate that Dr. Abbott shouldmake the above statement to college people. Admittingthe facts, let us find also their cause. It is becauseof the inconsistency of its teaching that the pulpit haslost its power with the masses. The pulpit backs up andendorses the teachings of all the colleges of our dayalong the lines of Higher Criticism and Evolution. Thepeople are coming to understand that this means that thepulpit is in antagonism to the Bible. If Evolution betrue, man never fell and hence needed no Redeemer andno saving from a fallen state, but needed merely to belet alone in his evolutionary progress. According toHigher Criticism the Bible in general is unreliable.Moses never wrote the books accredited to him, andIsaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and others never wrote thebooks accredited to them--never were inspired of God towrite these books. And if this be true, then Jesus andthe Apostles were deceived and could not have beeninspired by God when they quoted from these sacredwritings of the past and declared them to be the Wordof God and vouched for their authorship.NO WONDER CHURCH ATTENDANCE IS SLIMOn the other hand the public notice that the veryministers who thus preach Evolution, Higher Criticism,unbelief in the Divine Revelation, keep right alongpreaching some of the absurdities which our forefathersclaimed were in harmony with the Bible. Is it anywonder that the people are coming to see the inconsistencyof such a position? How long might they expectto be blind to it? What must be the influence?The result is that the masses have less and less confidencein the clergy. The people do not know what theclergy believe even when they hear them speak, for theiraddress may be from the standpoint of the creeds orfrom the standpoint of Higher Criticism, according totheir moods. The result of this uncertain sounding of thetrumpet is that the masses are coming to the conclusionthat the whole matter of religion is a big guess andthat some of the guesses are influenced by temporal considerations.No wonder Church attendance is slim! Nowonder doubt and skepticism are prevalent! No wonderthat faith in the Bible is undermined and religion madeto look ridiculous and contradictory!The unbelief of the people grows and threatens tobecome agnosticism, or worse, atheism! Those who havebrought about this condition of things during the pastthirty years are the college professors and the best educatedpulpiteers of Christendom. And now they standastonished at the results, which they should have foreseen.Verily they are fulfilling the Divine prophecies ofIsaiah, which, referring to our day, declare, "The wisdom