Blind Guides

I have just read a book entitled, “A Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion,” sent out from Chicago University. I wish someone would write a companion volume and entitle it “A Color-Blind Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion.” For these eminent gentlemen are blind to three things. They are blind to the purple—they see no royalty in Jesus Christ. To them He is an evolution from things before Him, and did not come down from heaven as He said He did, but came up from the mud with the rest.

They are blind to the red, for there is no acknowledgment of the atoning blood from beginning to end.

They are blind to the white light of revelation. The Bible is talked about in the book as “tradition” and its testimony rejected at will, and even the testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

If that represents our higher education, it is anti-Christian through and through. The first chapter draws a battle line. The author says, “Evolution is accepted by nearly every college professor in the north and denounced by nearly every evangelist.” That is the battle line. Our churches were founded and organized by evangelists; they have been kept up by evangelists and evangelistic pastors, and these college professors that teach evolution have to get an orthodox evangelist to come in occasionally to keep the thing from burial day.

This brings me to say this, that the authors of this voluminous production within my memory were evangelical preachers, every one of them. They preached in churches the salvation by the cross through the blood, and every one of them is an evangelical wreck. Character has not been wrecked yet. Why? Because it was formed in an evangelical atmosphere and under evangelical teaching. As young men, they took in the truth and it made character, and has kept it winsome, we are told, in its personality, but what about the young men to whom they are teaching this poison, and what is the drift of our universities in the land?

I heard a doctor in Chicago say the other day that he had visited a university with 6,000 students, and, though there were many ministerial students in former days, there is not a single one among the 6,000. Two entered as ministerial students and gave it up before the close of the first session. Every preacher’s son (and there were several of them) in that university was a practical infidel, and never attended church of any kind or took part in any Christian work. That university consumes 50,000 cigarettes a day, and 300 of the young women are inveterate smokers. What effect is this having upon our rising generation? It is bringing them down to the dust and mud.

Your mission and mine is to preach the Christ that died, and the Christ that rose again, and the Christ who is coming back with the reserves from heaven to finish the conquest of this world, which we, in His power, have begun. God help us do our part, under the power of the Holy Spirit, and expect Him to do His in His own good time.