We Need Christians With The Convictions Of The Reformation

Charles Spurgeon

From the pen of Charles Spurgeon:

Beware of a religion without holdfasts. But if I get a grip upon a doctrine they call me a bigot. Let them do so. Bigotry is a hateful thing, and yet that which is now abused as bigotry is a great virtue, and greatly needed in these frivolous times. I have been inclined lately to start a new denomination, and call it “the Church of the Bigoted.”

Everybody is getting to be so oily, so plastic, so untrue, that we need a race of hardshells to teach us how to believe. Those old-fashioned people who in former ages believed something and thought the opposite of it to be false, were truer folk, than the present timeservers. . . .

Yes, and as these gentlemen always find it unpleasant to be unpopular, they soften down the hard threatenings of Scripture as to the world to come, and put a color upon every doctrine to which worldly-wise men object.

The teachers of doubt are very doubtful teachers. A man must have something to hold to, or he will neither bless himself nor others. (Sermon: “Laying the Foundations”)

The Salem Witch Trials And Historical Perspective

From the pen of Dinesh D’Souza:

“And the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witch burnings? Contemporary historians have now established that the horrific images of the Inquisitions are largely a myth concocted first by the political enemies of Spain-mainly English writers who shaped our American understanding of that event-and later by the political enemies of religion. Henry Kamen’s book The Spanish Inquisition is subtitled “A Historical Revision”, and it is a long book, because Kamen has a lot of revising to do. One of his chapters is called “Inventing the Inquisition.” He means that much of the modern stereotype of the Inquisition is essentially made up. How many people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition? Kamen estimates that it was around 2,000. These deaths are all tragic, but we must remember that they occurred over a period of 350 years. Religion-inspired killings simply cannot compete with the murders perpetrated by atheist regimes. Taken together, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witch burnings killed approximately 200,000 people over a five-hundred year period. We have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.” (What’s So Great About Christianity)