Talmage's Public Feud with Presbyterian Synod Critics

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, January 8, 1880

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 55, No. 2

Talmage's Public Feud with Presbyterian Synod Critics

The state of affairs described in the following item, which we clip from the Detroit Evening News of Dec. 13, must furnish a very edifying spectacle to the skeptic and the non-religious world in general. And yet some are unwilling to admit that there is anything radically wrong with the popular Christianity of to-day.

“Talmage, on last Sunday, from his pulpit, supposed to be dedicated to the preaching of the gospel of peace, boasted that he knew things about the members of the Presbyterian synod which, should he reveal them, would make the community’s hair stand on end, and make the members in question quickly hide their diminished heads in shame. This threat does not seem to have had the terrifying effect intended, as the twenty-two complainants to the synod publicly united in a card yesterday denouncing Talmage as a slanderer, and his statement as a tissue of falsehoods. If this be the fruit of popular pulpit Christianity, and it is certainly the principal fruit of Talmage’s share in it, the less we have of it the better.”