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MODERN BELIEF

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · June 3, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 23

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MODERN BELIEF.

The New York World, noticing the changes in modern belief, furnishes the following records of the wanderings of a modern member of civilized society in his search for a religion:—
Nine years of age—An attentive Sunday-school scholar.
Ten—Has committed to memory 2,000 verses of Scripture.
Eleven—Joins a church.
Twelve—Model boy.
Thirteen—Sent away to a boarding-school.
Fourteen—Not so model. Learns to smoke.
Seventeen—Begins to be “liberal.”
Twenty—More liberal.
Twenty-one—Slightly skeptical as to the Bible.
Twenty-two—Doubts Noah’s flood, Joshua’s sun, and Jonah’s whale.
Twenty-three—Renews Bible belief and becomes Episcopal Low Church.
Twenty-four—Becomes Episcopal and High-church, and drinks lager.
Twenty-six—Joins a scientific debating society, and becomes a close student of geology.
Twenty-seven—Orthodox belief wrecked on the “testimony of the rocks.”
Twenty-eight—Becomes Unitarian.
Twenty-nine—Becomes a Universalist.
Thirty—Attends a course of parlor lectures. Radical on all subjects. Starts a community of congenial spirits, who quarrel, bark, bite and scratch each other like cats and dogs. After six-weeks’ communion, leaves. Lawsuits and scandal.
Thirty-one—Throws the whole Bible overboard, and laughs it to scorn. Is enraged at the least mention of Moses, Aaron, and the apostles. Slanders Abraham, David, and Solomon. Very proud of speaking out, and announcing his “principles” in public. Declares his scorn of people who dare not.
Thirty-two—Is turned head and crop out of the Universalist Church. Falls through everlasting moral space into nowhere. Begins to think it does not pay to speak out so openly in meeting.
Thirty-three—Becomes a secret rapping-tapping spiritualist.
Thirty-four—Becomes a piano-lifting, flower-growing, invisible-voiced and body-lifting spiritualist; and hunts for Kidd’s money under spirit direction.
Thirty-five—Becomes an apparitional materializing spiritualist. Communes with Captain Kidd and Shakespeare.
Thirty-six—Detects a fraud. Renounces spiritualism.
Thirty-seven—Joins the Liberal Club, and combats everything.
Thirty-eight—Leaves the Liberal Club and becomes a Theosophist. Grants premiums to ancient wisdom and communes with the “elementaries.”
Thirty-nine—Believes in total annihilation for a year, and determines to get all the fun possible out of his life.
Forty—Writes a book on “Pure Nothingism.”
Forty-one—Renounces Nothingism and joins the Scientists. Worships mathematically and praises in rhomboids, cubes, triangles, and chemical formulas. Reduces emotion and sentiment to vegetable and mineral constituents.
Forty-two—Reads Darwin and ciphers his genealogy down to a clam.
Forty-three—Shakes off Darwin. Talks of Swedenborgianism for a rest. Advertises for some new faith.
Forty-four—Thinks of joining the Catholic Church. Not that he can believe anything at present, but the church, as he remarks, will “save him the trouble of thinking.” Temporary finis.