p. 249 | TAKE IT FOR GRANTED

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, April 15, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 16

TAKE IT FOR GRANTED.

THE Christian at Work says: “The Herald of Gospel Liberty is editorially discussing through several issues the question, ‘Will the soul survive after death?’ It ought to go back further and inquire, ‘Is there a God?’ or it might ask, ‘Was Jesus a true prophet?’ Both questions would be equally pertinent to a religious journal, which is ordinarily supposed to take some things for granted.”

That, friend, is just the trouble with many conclusions adopted in the theological world: they are taken for granted. This has been the case with the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and it would be immensely pleasing to many parties, if people would continue to treat it in the same way. The nervous solicitude expressed that we take this still for granted, reveals the secret misgivings that exist in the minds of the friends of this doctrine. Oh! don’t investigate. Just take it for granted.

But, good friends, the Bible does not ask us to take anything for granted, not even the existence of a God; for he declares himself the maker of the heavens and the earth; nor the fact that Jesus was a true prophet, for he declared that he was the Son of God, and the words that he spoke were not his own, but the words of Him that sent him. But if the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is in the Bible at all, it must be taken for granted; and there is the rub.

More and more unwilling are people becoming to accept of doctrines which rest on such a foundation. The spirit of inquiry is abroad. Better not try to weight down the safety-valve by pressing people to take this matter for granted, lest the accumulating pressure, too long restrained, should rend into fragments more theological systems than is either desirable or necessary.