RELIGIOUS IDIOTS | AdventAI

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, February 26, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 9

RELIGIOUS IDIOTS.

Dr. Seguin, the great authority on all that relates to idiocy, regarded this unhappy condition as a state of prolonged childhood, in which the graces of infancy have departed, while the feeble development of body and mind remain. When we see the babe playing with his fingers and his toes, grasping at the sunbeam that falls on his cradle, trying feebly to walk, but unable to stand steadily, we are amused, interested; it is natural, it is childlike. Suppose that when five or ten years have passed, we see the child, and he is still where he was; still playing with his fingers, still amused with the sunbeam, and still feebly tottering. We start back in horror, exclaiming, “The child is an idiot.” For we know that progress, growth, is the condition of health, bodily and mental.

Are there not among us religious idiots; persons whose spiritual growth has stopped in their infancy, who have never grown? We meet a young convert; his views of the truth are but immature; his faith is but feeble; he has to struggle against the old man within, and against temptation without. Often his struggles are vain and he yields to temptation: his devotions are fitful and irregular; for devotion is not yet a habit with him; he has to force himself toward it with an effort. But all these things do not discourage us; rather, they arouse our sympathy, our affection, our prayers.

Years pass on; we meet the same convert. In his capacity for business, there has been a growth; he can make more money than he could; his mind has grown. But as to his religious nature, there has been no progress; his knowledge of the Lord’s word has not enlarged; his faith is just as weak; his self-denying benevolence is no larger; it is just as hard for him to deny himself as it was; he has gained no power of pleading with the souls of men; he has gained no power in prayer; he is just as much the victim of temptation. His benefactions are just what they were. He gave then a dollar with a struggle; and with the same struggle he gives a dollar now. It is just as hard for him to forgive injuries; just as hard to withstand the solicitations of fashion; just as hard to forego worldly pleasure, to repress anger and passion. What shall we say, what can we do, but start back, and exclaim, “A religious idiot!”

Have you grown? Are you growing? Are you gaining victories? Is your present light so clear and bright that you look back on the period of your conversion as but the dawn? If not, then must not you be regarded as a case of religious idiocy?—Selected.