Beware of a religion
without holdfasts….
Everybody is getting
to be so oily, so plastic, so untrue, that we need a race of hardshells to
teach us how to believe. Those old-fashioned people who in former ages believed something and
thought the opposite of it to be false, were truer folk, than the present
timeservers.
I should like to ask the divines
of the broad school whether any doctrine is worth a man’s dying for it. They
would have to reply, “Well, of course, if a man had to go to the stake or
change his opinions, the proper way would be to state them with much diffidence,
and to be extremely respectful to the opposite school.”
But suppose he is required to
deny the truth?
“Well, there is much to be said
on each side, and probably the negative may have a measure of truth in it as
well as the positive. At any rate, it cannot be a prudent thing to incur the
odium of being burned, and so it might be preferable to leave the matter an
open question for the time being.”
Yes, and as these gentlemen
always find it unpleasant to be unpopular, they soften down the hard
threatenings of Scripture as to the world to come, and put a color upon every
doctrine to which worldly-wise men object.<big>The teachers of doubt are very
doubtful teachers.
Charles Spurgeon
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