Article August 21, 1920 Issue

I have heard the doctrine sent forth from the pulpit of...

T. A. Latta

Tulsa (Okla.) World

I have heard the doctrine sent forth from the pulpit of the church that the days of divine miracles passed with the Christ himself, and in the same breath the assurance given that the redemptive power of the evangelical theory still remained, but could be realized only after death! This denying one half the promise and admonitions of the Savior and preaching the other half was not intended to be a compromise with modern thought and the thing we call devil, but it was, in my judgment, just that and nothing else in fact. I would like to see the Biblical authority for such a conclusion. I would like any modern pulpiteer to point me to a single place in the life of Jesus Christ where he withdrew his promise or relieved those who profess discipleship from the clear and unmistakable obligation. Both may be there. I make no pretense of being a Bible student. But if so, I should like to see read.

It should mean much to the church that a cult has grown up of recent years that rests its case almost altogether on not alone its teachings that the power of God is sufficient to heal bodily ills now, but on its ability to demonstrate the truth of that teaching. This cult has gained hundreds of thousands of adherents not alone from among the ignorant and credulous, as some suspect, not from among those sound in body and spirit, but from among the educated and refined who in almost every instance were suffering from bodily or spiritual distempers; who were wretched and in thousands of cases given up for incurables by men of science as well as the representatives of the church. They found a power that did restore health, that did compose their mental disturbances, and lashed doubt and despair from the temple of God's designing. Grant that the trouble was mental; what then?

It is not meeting the opportunity of the church or discharging the obligation of the church for the denominationist to feel called upon to preach a diatribe against this cult every so often. It is not meeting the issue for the representative of the church to sneer that these so-called cures are merely the results of emotionalism, that the thousands who have regained hope and health and found happiness as a result of their acceptance of the new cult's teachings, are merely laboring under a hallucination. That attitude simply denies, and by those ordained to uphold, the autocracy and omnipotence of God.

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