A STRANGE CHANGE | AdventAI

The Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · December 11, 1879

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 54, No. 24

A STRANGE CHANGE.

It has never been known since Protestantism had its birth that Catholicism has yielded a hair’s-breadth to its creed, ritual, or religious habits in any way. But it is now reported that since Mr. Moody’s great revival meetings have produced such wonderful results, and it is so apparent that a very potent instrumentality in these meetings has been the congregational singing, the Catholic church, which has always had choir singing, and allowed none but the singers to have their hymns in church, is now adopting congregational singing, and sending out missionaries who are preaching and imitating very much the Protestant heretics.

It is perfectly evident that a change is taking place among all who are laboring in revival work, and many are depending more upon singing than formerly, and less upon preaching the doctrines of the gospel. In fact, modern singing has very nearly excluded doctrinal expression, and substituted an endless repetition of sounds giving very few ideas. To us it is becoming more apparent every year that solid, essential Bible truths are being more and more dismissed from worship, and something artistic, fanciful, or sensational is taking their place. Is it not possible that the prophet’s prediction that, “truth is fallen in the street, and that equity cannot enter,” and of the time when there will be “no intercessor,” and the Judge shall “put on the garments of vengeance for clothing,” (see Isa. 59:14, 16, 17), is about to be fulfilled? Has not truth commenced already to fall in the reverence and confidence of the people? If it is so, then putting “sound doctrine” in the background because the people will not “endure” it, and substituting something sensational, which will please their “itching ears,” will become a distinctly marked sign of the last days. We think this sign is very discernible at the present time.—World’s Crisis.