[Quit Your Worrying! by George Wharton James]@TWC D-Link bookQuit Your Worrying! CHAPTER XIII 4/18
The burden of his cry is that you must flee from the wrath to come--hell--by accepting the vicarious atonement made by the "blood of Jesus." In season and out of season, he urges that you "come under the blood." His face is tense, his brow wrinkled, his eyes strained, his voice raucous, his whole demeanor full of worry over the salvation of others. Another friend is a Seventh Day Adventist, who is full of zeal for the declaration of the "Third Angel's Message," for he believes that only by heeding it, keeping sacred the hours from sunset on Friday to Saturday sunset, in accordance with his reading of the fourth commandment, and also believing in the speedy second coming of Christ, can one's soul's salvation be attained. The Baptist is assured that his mode of baptism--complete immersion--is the only one that satisfies the demands of heaven, and the more rigorous members of the sect refuse communion with those who have not obeyed, as they see the command.
The members of the "Christian" Church--as the disciples of Alexander Campbell term themselves--while they assent that they are tied to no creed except the New Testament, demand immersion as a prerequisite to membership in their body.
The Methodist, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Nazarene, and many others, are "evangelical" in their belief, as is a large portion of the Church of England, and its American offshoot, both of which are known as the Episcopal Church.
Another portion, however, of this church is known as "ritualistic," and the two branches in England recently became so involved in a heated discussion as to the propriety of certain of their bishops partaking in official deliberations with ministers of the other, but outside, evangelistic churches, that for a time it seemed as if the whole Episcopal Church would be disrupted by the fierceness and anger gendered in the differences of opinion. To my own mind, all this worry was much ado about nothing.
Each man's brain and conscience must guide him in matters of this kind, and the worry, fret, stew, evolved out of the matter, seem to me a proof that real religion had little to do with it. Recently one good brother came to me with tears in his voice, if not in his eyes, worried seriously as to my own religious belief because I had asserted in a public address that I believed the earnest prayer of a good Indian woman reached the ear of God as surely as did my own prayers, or those of any man, woman, minister, or priest living.
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