BACKSLIDDEN
Brother Brooks in the last number of the Banner (and his authority as the oldest holiness editor in the country can not be doubted) says that the aggressiveness has gone out of the holiness movement, and ceasing to be aggressive it is a dying thing. In most places its numbers are decreasing, only a few accessions.
Well, he tells the truth. The holiness people as a general thing through the country are backslidden from God. A large per cent of them never had anything but a reclaimed backslidden experience to leave. They got back to God and called it by the new name of holiness, taught to do so by superficial teachers that wanted to swell the Banner reports.
The chief cause of this awful declension that has rolled back the tide of the salvation of the world a decade is that the editors and evangelists, failing to become more and more aggressive at every point against sin in the church and out, especially among holiness people, have backslidden as a class....
Brother Brooks told me he could not put radical truth into the Banner without Brother Haney and Brother Kent and other such temporizers writing and denouncing him; so Brother Brooks would yield and backslide from Holy Ghost power.
Bro. Isaiah Reid told Brother Sherman he did not want anything in his paper that would indicate that the holiness people were not all right; he was planning to have the Highway as a support for his old age. A year ago he called for a thousand "firemen" in the holiness work as the only thing needed. He has spent his energies this year in regulating the fiery come-outers from wrecking the train, and evidently wants the oaks of Bashan slashed down with a little hatchet, and not with a broadax. Rams' horns, goad sticks, and the unsectarian "jaw-bone of an ass" Philistine-killer, he evidently does not take much stock in. Brothers Inskip and Macdonald are not square on the Freemason question and are churchy. While the shell remains in part of radical holiness, that only is the real thing, much of the spirit is gone. You may call it fault-finding, sour godliness, or whatever you please, these are God's facts about your case. You know the whole batch of you are afraid to throw red-hot truth uncompromisingly everywhere. We except from this catalog Baker and Arnold of the Free Methodist, Warner of the Trumpet, Johnson of the Stumbling Stone (if he had the Holy Ghost), and the Sword, and some others.
Now Brother editors and evangelists, suffer the word of exhortation from a "jaw-bone," break up your fallow ground, do your first works, burn up Haney's chapter on dress, not resolve against it; pay your debts, or go and acknowledge them at least; cease to print such dawdle as Brother Bryant's church holiness writings; seek for and get the Holy Ghost again; and lead the people up into the land.—Vanguard.
Satanic forces were arrayed against the reformation work in every conceivable way, not only by mobs and undisguised, professional evil (though this form of attack was usually instigated by the sectarian element), but also by deception—by teachers and editors who were apparently right on some main question in order to deceive, but wrong on some other vital points. A writer in the Trumpet points out one of these destructive agencies.
A DESTRUCTIVE HERESY
By D. W. M'Laughlin
There is an eternal antagonism between true holiness and fanaticism in all its phases, and the individual possessed of the fulness of the Holy Ghost will be able to detect fanaticism in others whether it be in outward act or deportment or in the more subtle form of heretical teaching. The Spirit and the Word agree, and the Holy Spirit moves and works in harmony with the written Word and never contrary thereto.
The writer has been receiving from time to time during the last four years copies of the Stumbling Stone, and while much truth is found in its columns as to the evils of sect divisions, the destructive heresy of Count Zinzendorf (that sanctification is not subsequent to regeneration) is held with inveterate opposition to the gospel order. Consequently, from this standpoint, the holiness movement is of the devil, and the second-grace Christians are in need of the first grace. The Stumbling Stone seems to attack every movement extant, even to the Salvation Army, as well as all holiness associations and bands for the promotion of entire sanctification. Even the position of the Gospel Trumpet he calls a holiness schism, because the editor makes a distinction between justified and sanctified believers. And he proposes to "kick Brother Warner's justification cobhouse into pi," by which he exhibits his ignorance of the real plan of salvation. He might as well talk of kicking God's Word into pi as to overthrow the two distinct works of grace, justification and sanctification....
By the above and similar remarks the Stumbling Stone editor reveals the antagonism in his heart to the "second grace" in the Bible economy of salvation. Now, my honest conviction is that a come-outism that sets itself squarely against holiness as a definite experience subsequent to pardon, is surely of the devil. It is a fact that wholly saved souls who are spiritual and discerning men detect at once the carnality in such persons, and, quite naturally, are led to conclude that "if such spirits are the fruits of come-outism I will have nothing to do with it." Thus, this spurious antiholiness come-outism is a snare of Satan to deter honest souls from separating from sectism, leaving them under the pressure of unholy corporations, which often results in compromise and the loss of the Spirit of God. A come-outism that sets itself to fighting the sects in a vindictive spirit, condemning and unchristianizing all who do not at once come out, can not be of God. Let us lead the children of God to the true apostolic unity, but never attempt to drive them out of Babylon; and, above all things, let us keep sweet and deal kindly with persons who, under the blinding influence of sectarian education, can not yet see the sin of sects, and the true church of God.
Sound teaching, in connection with the come-out movement, is of the utmost importance. False doctrinal theories and extravagant notions cause untold disaster to the cause we represent....
In the issue of May 1, 1883, when the Trumpet was yet printed at Cardington, Ohio, Brother Warner speaks of how the cause was sifted at that place.