There is nothing new in this book. The plain teaching of Scripture as to sin, salvation, and judgment to come is falsified while pretending to cleave closely to it. The faulty views and expressions of otherwise sound Christians are set up as the standard of orthodox belief, and then demolished sometimes by what is true, more often by what is infinitely worse than that which is under criticism.
If all Christians held the author’s views, the 90,000 heathen that he tells us, on page 9, are dying every day would be left to their fate in this world, to say nothing of the next. Such views paralyze all efforts to seek the eternal blessing of souls. It is either universal salvation or annihilation; why, therefore, trouble about ourselves or anybody else? “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Such writers always treat the perdition of the lost as God’s foreordination instead of as man’s deliberate choice. Where does Scripture ever say that anybody is “hopelessly doomed to an eternity of woe”? Man is warned of the consequences of continuing in sin; he is distinctly informed of the holiness of God, His horror of sin, and the utter impossibility of that holy God allowing sinful beings to dwell in His presence in heaven; he is also told of a Saviour ready and willing to save any sinner, even the vilest and the blackest.
But man will not believe:
Imagine anybody with the Bible open before him penning such words as these: “It is after the people come forth from their graves that God will save them”! Revelation 20 teaches something very different, and Isaiah 25. is speaking of a national resurrection of Israel just prior to the millennium, and not that of the dead for judgment at the close of that period.
The writer is a “millennial dawnist.” He tells us, “By the end of the millennium all mankind will have had restored to them the perfection which was lost by Adam,” &c., but entirely ignores the solemn judgment of the great white throne when the thousand years are finished, when those who have died in their sins will be judged for their sins and cast into the lake of fire.
Briefly put, according to this writer all men will eventually be saved, only not through Christ― “justice did not demand Christ’s death” he tells us―the testing of the millennium will do this for everybody, though how he does not inform us! Still there will be a loosing of Satan, even he must admit, after the millennium is over, but this is airily passed over, for our author does not expect many to be deceived (“comparatively few will follow Satan”), and this in full view of the distinct and awful utterance of Scripture, “the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.”
It is trifling with men’s deepest and eternal concerns.
ED.