18 Sermon Illustrations on False Teaching

A little boy, when asked what was his favorite text in the Bible, repeated the stirring order of Gen. Dix when he was Secretary of War: "If any man hauls down the American flag, shoot him on the spot." A great Sunday-school man, when encouraging teachers to meet often together for mutual improvement, enforced his remarks by adding, "As the good book says, 'Birds of a feather should flock together.'" Dr. Peirce.

Pope Julius II began the building of the magnificent church at Rome, but left it unfinished. His successor, Leo X, was desirous to complete this superb edifice, but being involved in debt, and finding the apostolic treasury exhausted, he had recourse to the selling of indulgences, a gainful traffic, for the procuring a sufficient sum of money. Accordingly, in 1517 he published general indulgences throughout all Europe, to such as would contribute to the building of St. Peter's. The sum of ten shillings was sufficient to purchase the pardon of sins, and the ransom of a soul from purgatory!

The dealers in indulgences had established themselves at Hagenau in 1517. The wife of a shoemaker profiting by the permission given in the instruction of the commissary-general, had procured against her husband's will, a letter of indulgence, and had paid for it a gold florin. Shortly after, she died; and the widower omitting to have mass said for the repose of her soul the curate charged him with contempt of religion, and the judge of Hagenau summoned him to appear before him. The shoemaker put in his pocket his wife's indulgence, and repaired to the place of summons. "Is your wife dead?" asked the judge. "Yes," answered the shoemaker. "What have you done with her?" "I buried her and commended her soul to God." "But have you had a mass said for the salvation of her soul?" "I have not—it was not necessary;—she went to heaven in the moment of her death." How do you know that "—"Here is the evidence of it." The widower drew from his pocket the indulgence, and the judge in presence of the curate, read, in so many words, that in the moment of death, the woman who had received it would go, not into purgatory, but straight into heaven. "If the curate pretends that a mass is necessary after that," said the shoemaker, "my wife has been cheated by our holy father the Pope; but if she has not been cheated, then the curate is deceiving me." There was no reply to this defence, and the accused was acquitted. It was thus that the good sense of the people disposed of these impostures.

Every false cause can find men of sharp wits to plead it. If God's people can answer with the language of a clear conscience, they have nothing to fear

Sons of prophets air their doubts about miracles (v. 16). Questioned literal translation, so the Christ of some preachers is but a ghost Christ. Theologians hindered Elijah, demanded critical investigation (v. 17). Elijah yielded to their clamor, but did not regain his power until he rebuked the false theologians (v. 18). Repudiate the Jericho theology (2 Tim. 4:2).

When the electric trolley-cars were first set running in Seoul, a peculiar result manifested itself in the nation. We quote from _The Outlook_:

Little by little the heavens grew dry and the earth rolled up clouds of dust; day followed day with no signs of rain, and the caking paddy-fields grinned and gasped. What could be the cause of it? The geomancers and ground-prophets were consulted, and their answer was, “The devil that runs the thunder and lightning wagon has caused the drought.” Eyes no longer looked with curiosity but glared at the trolley-cars, and men swore under their breath and curst the “vile beast” as it went humming by, till, worked up beyond endurance, there was a crash and an explosion, one car had been rolled over, and another was set on fire, while a mob of thousands took possession of the streets foaming and stamping like wild beasts.

The notion that alcohol may do good because, for a moment, it seems to do good, was well answered by a physician’s response to a man who was somewhat too much given to the pleasures of the table. This man had said to the doctor:

“What do you think of the influence of alcohol on the digestion, doctor?”

“I think that its influence is bad,” said the physician.

“But a little whisky taken just before a meal is the only key that will open my appetite, doctor.”

“I don’t believe in opening things with false keys, sir!” answered the other.

Nor is alcohol the only false key in common use. Pretension, misrepresentation, any means not adapted to the desired end--all are false keys and must fail.

There are many remedies, real or reputed for physical ills, but there is but one sovereign remedy for body, soul and spirit, namely, the life of God fully received into the human soul. In an article on “Strange Medicines,” in the _Nineteenth Century_, Miss Cumming quotes a few of the healing spells which to this day are practised by the peasantry of various districts in Great Britain, and which are considered certain remedies:

The Northumbrian cure for warts is to take a large snail, rub the wart well with it, and then impale the snail on a thorn-hedge. As the creature wastes away the warts will surely disappear. In the west of England eel’s blood serves the same purpose. For goiter or wen, the hand of a dead child must be rubbed nine times across the lump, or, still better, the hand of a suicide may be substituted. In the vicinity of Stamfordham, in Northumberland, whooping-cough is cured by putting the head of a live trout into the patient’s mouth, and letting the trout breathe into the latter. Or else a hairy caterpillar is put into a small bag and tied around the child’s neck. The cough ceases as the insect dies. Another cure for whooping-cough is offerings of hair. In Sunderland the crown of the head is shaved and the hair hung upon a bush or tree, with the full faith that as the birds carry away the hair, so will the cough vanish. In Lincolnshire a girl suffering from the ague cuts a lock of her hair and binds it around an aspen-tree, praying the latter to shake in her sted. The remedy for a toothache at Tavistock, in Devonshire, is to bite a tooth from a skull in the churchyard and keep it always in the pocket. At Loch Carron, in Ross-shire, an occasional cure for erysipelas is to cut off half the ear of a cat and let the blood drip on the inflamed surface. In Cornwall the treatment for the removal of whelks or small pimples from the eyelids of children is to pass the tail of a black cat nine times over the part affected. Toads are made to do service in divers manners in Cornwall and Northampton for the cure of nose-bleeding and quinsy, while “toad powder,” or even a live toad or spider shut up in a box, is still in some places accounted as useful a charm against contagion as it was in the days of Sir Kenelm Digby. The old smallpox and dropsy remedy known as _pulvis Ethiopicus_, was nothing more nor less than powdered toad. In Devonshire any person bitten by a viper is advised to kill the creature at once and rub the wound with its fat. It is said that this practise has survived in some portions of the United States, where the flesh of the rattlesnake is accounted the best cure for its own bite. Black, in his “Folk Medicine,” states that the belief in the power of snake-skin as a cure for rheumatism still exists in New England. Such a belief is probably a direct heritage from Britain.

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While many empirical conclusions are, roughly speaking, correct; while they are exact enough to be of great help in practical life; while the presages of a weatherwise sailor or hunter may be more accurate, within a certain restricted range, than those of a scientist who relies wholly upon scientific observations and tests; while, indeed, empirical observations and records furnish the raw or crude material of scientific knowledge, yet the empirical method affords no way of discriminating between right and wrong conclusions. Hence it is responsible for a multitude of false beliefs. The technical designation for one of the commonest fallacies is _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_; the belief that because one thing comes after another, it comes because of the other. Now this fallacy of method is the animating principle of empirical conclusions, even when correct--the correctness being almost as much a matter of good luck as of method. That potatoes should be planted only during the crescent moon, that near the sea people are born at high-tide and die at low-tide, that a comet is an omen of danger, that bad luck follows the cracking of a mirror, that a patent medicine cures a disease--these and a thousand like notions are asseverated on the basis of empirical coincidence and conjunction. Moreover, habits of expectation and belief are formed otherwise than by a number of repeated similar cases.--JOHN DEWEY, “How We Think.”