And there followed another angel, saying,
Babylon is fallen, is fallen,
that great city,
because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.
Revelation 14:8
"Babylon meets with this spiritual fall "because she made all nations drink of the wine of wrath [not anger, but intense passion] of her fornication." There is but one thing to which this can refer, and that is false doctrines. She has corrupted the pure truths of God's word, and made the nations drunken with pleasing fables.
In the form of the papacy
she has supplanted the gospel by substituting for it a false system of salvation:
*Through the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception
she denies that God in Christ dwelt in human flesh.
*She has sought to set aside the mediation of Christ
and has put another system of mediation in its place.
*She has attempted to take away the priesthood of Jesus
and substitute an earthly priesthood.
*She has made salvation dependent upon confession to mortal man
and thus has separated the sinner from Jesus,
the only one through whom his sins can be forgiven.
*She condemns the way of salvation through faith as "damnable heresy,"
and substitutes the doctrine of salvation by works.
*Her crowning blasphemy is the doctrine of transubstantiation,
or the idolatrous sacrifice of the mass,
which is declared to be "one and the same as that of the cross"
and which, in "some senses," is said to have "the advantage over Calvary,"
for by it "the work of our redemption is carried out."
Among the doctrines she teaches contrary to the word of God,
may be mentioned the following:
may be mentioned the following:
*The substitution of tradition and the voice of the church
as an infallible guide in the place of the Bible.
*The change of the Sabbath of the fourth commandment, the seventh day,
into the festival of Sunday as the rest day of the Lord and a memorial of His resurrection,
a memorial which has never been commanded,
and can by no possible means appropriately commemorate that event.
Fathered by heathenism as "the wild solar holiday of all pagan times,"
Sunday was lead to the font by the pope,
and christened as an institution of the gospel church.
Thus an attempt was made to destroy a memorial
which the great God had set up
to commemorate His own magnificent creative work,
and erect another in its state to commemorate the resurrection of Christ,
for which there was no occasion,
as the Lord Himself had already provided a memorial
for that purpose in baptism by immersion.
*The doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul.
This also was derived from the pagan world,
and the "Fathers of the church" became the foster-fathers of this pernicious doctrine
as a part of divine truth.
This error nullifies the two great Scripture doctrines of the resurrection and the general judgment, and furnishes an open door to modern spiritism.
From it have sprung such other evil doctrines as
the conscious state of the dead,
saint worship,
mariology,
purgatory,
reward at death,
prayers and baptisms for the dead,
eternal torment, and
universal salvation.
The doctrine that the saints, as disembodied spirits, find their eternal inheritance in faraway, indefinable regions, "beyond the bounds of time and space." Thus multitudes have been turned away from the Scriptural view that this present earth is to be destroyed by fire at the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men, and that from its ashes the voice of Omnipotence will evoke a new earth, which will be the future everlasting kingdom of glory, and which the saints will possess as their eternal inheritance.
*Sprinkling instead of immersion,
the latter being the only Scriptural mode of baptism,
and a fitting memorial of the burial and resurrection of our Lord,
for which purpose it was designed.
By the corruption of this ordinance
and its destruction as a memorial of the resurrection of Christ,
the way was prepared for the substitution of something else for this purpose--the Sunday rest day.
*The doctrine of a temporal millennium,
or a thousand years of peace and prosperity and righteousness all over the earth
before the second coming of Christ.
This doctrine is especially calculated to shut the ears of the people
against the evidences of the second advent near,
and will probably lull as many souls into a state of carnal security
leading to their final ruin,
as any heresy which has ever been devised by the great enemy of truth."
as any heresy which has ever been devised by the great enemy of truth."
Daniel&theRevelation p.649-651 Uriah Smith
