Apostate

“ I want to know if any one of you who has got the spirit of "Mormonism" in you, the spirit that Joseph and Hyrum had, or that we have here, would say, Let us hear both sides of the question, let us listen, and prove all things? What do you want to prove? Do you want to prove that an old apostate, who has been cut off from the Church thirteen times for lying, is anything worthy of notice? ”

“ These apostates talk of proof! Have we not proved Joseph Smith to be a Prophet—a restorer, standing at the head of this dispensation? Have we not proved the Priesthood which he placed upon others by the command of God?
I see no ground, then, to prove or to investigate the calling of an apostate, who has always been trying to impose upon this people. It is too late in the day for us to stop to inquire whether such an outcast has the truth.
We have truths already developed, unfulfilled by us—unacted upon. ”

“ I am beginning to believe that this wilful apostasy, after clear light given, is what is spoken of in Heb. vi. I can remember no example, either in the Bible or Mission-life, of any apostate deliberately choosing to forsake Christ, after being received and welcomed, being “renewed unto repentance.” We have had so many dreadful backsliders,—who have never returned. ”

“ Some who were longing for full salvation, when they saw the united influence of an apostate church arrayed against this very fundamental doctrine of their creed, were scared away from the good purposes of their heart and away from the meeting. Poor souls! Having lost a good conscience they can not look me in the face; and vainly they talk of growing the remaining sin out of the heart. Oh, that God would appoint salvation for this people! ”

“ This is the meaning of the apostle, and the case is that of a deliberate apostate - one who has utterly rejected Jesus Christ and his atonement, and renounced the whole Gospel system. It has nothing to do with backsliders in our common use of that term. A man may be overtaken in a fault, or he may deliberately go into sin, and yet neither renounce the Gospel, nor deny the Lord that bought him. ”

“ The thoughtful student cannot fail to see in the progress of the great apostasy and its results the existence of an overruling power, operating toward eventual good, however mysterious its methods. The heart-rending persecutions to which the saints were subjected in the early centuries of our era, the anguish, the torture, the bloodshed, incurred in defense of the testimony of Christ, the rise of an apostate church, blighting the intellect and leading captive the souls of men—all these dread scenes were foreknown to the Lord. ”

“ Apostasy which extends to infidelity is also twofold: before God and before the Church. The first kind is committed by any person who really had faith, even though unbaptized or not a Catholic; the second kind is committed only by those who were baptized and were Catholics. Examples: A catechumen who accepted Christianity and asked for Baptism, becomes an apostate before God if he abandons his belief and purpose and goes back to paganism. Similarly, a person brought up as a Lutheran becomes an apostate before God, if he abandons all belief in Christianity. ”

“ Now, if you will please to hearken and hear, you Latter-day Saints, do not spend another dollar with an apostate, neither in this city nor in any other. Will we purchase from outsiders? Yes, and call them ladies and gentlemen, because many of them are the friends of God if they did but know it. There are plenty in the world who want to be, but very few come here except these apostates, who would sap the fountain of the Kingdom of God, and destroy all that was virtuous and truthful on the earth, like many others who never come into the Church. ”

“ There was the apostate, for example, whom he tried to save at the expense of one of the doctrines of his church. Just as Baptists believe in "election" and Presbyterians in predestination, the Methodists believe in apostasy—that is, that God will forsake a man and never answer his prayers if the man waits too long before he begins to pray; and that if after he has been converted he leaves the way of righteousness there is always danger that God will abandon him in his sins. ”

“ The Protestant evangelical denominations have so tied up one another's hands, and their own, that, between them all, a man cannot become a preacher at all, anywhere, without accepting some book besides the Bible.... And is not the Protestant church apostate? Oh! remember, the final form of apostasy shall rise, not by crosses, processions, baubles. We understand all that. Apostasy never comes on the outside. It develops. It is an apostasy that shall spring into life within us; an apostasy that shall martyr a man who believes his Bible ever so holily ”

“ There was not, so far as we know, a single apostate Catholic in the community at Plymouth, not one who, having tasted the pure Gospel, known the divinely given faith and the divinely instituted worship, turned to wallow in the mire of man-made creeds and worship devised by shallow men. Standish cannot be accused of being in league with known apostates. ”

“ Ask an apostate to go and preach salvation to a perishing world, and his reply would be, "I cannot go, I am too poor." They are a perfect abomination among men. Did they ever build up the kingdom of God in any way? Never. They have done nothing but apostatize, and they will now continually try to destroy the work of God with all their might. This is all they ever did do, and it is all they ever will do. There is not a faithful Elder here who would not, if called upon, readily go forth to preach the Gospel in distant countries, though he had not a shoe to his feet, or a coat to his back. ”

“ This opinion, however, is held by most, that the devil was an angel, and that, having become an apostate, he induced as many of the angels as possible to fall away with himself, and these up to the present time are called his angels. ”

“ Further, an apostate from the faith is an unbeliever. Now we find that certain holy men served unbelieving masters; thus Joseph served Pharaoh, Daniel served Nabuchodonosor, and Mardochai served Assuerus. Therefore apostasy from the faith does not release subjects from allegiance to their sovereign.
Objection 3: Further, just as by apostasy from the faith, a man turns away from God, so does every sin. ”

“ Among the Romanists, apostasy also signifies the forsaking of a religious order, whereof a man had made profession, without a lawful dispensation. The ancients distinguished three kinds of apostasy: the first, a supererogatione, is committed by a priest, or religious, who abandons his profession, and returns to his lay state; the second, a mandatis Dei, by a person of any condition, who abandons the commands of God, though he retains his faith; the third, a fide, by him who not only abandons his works, but also the faith. There is this difference between an apostate and a heretic ”

“ Do we see men that are following after false and delusive spirits? Yes. When a man comes right out, as an independent devil, and says, "Damn Mormonism, and all the Mormons," and is off with himself, not to Texas, but to California, (you know it used to be to Texas) , I say he is a gentleman, by the side of a nasty sneaking apostate who is opposed to nothing but Christianity. ”

“ You may bring all the lies and newspaper stories you can hatch up, and all the misrepresentations you can conceive, and use them against the Divine truths of the Book of Mormon, to save your crumbling apostate systems from utter ruin; you may pile up your falsehoods like mountains ”

“ For the man who wishes this license to be granted him, might as well ask of the Church, or of God Himself, that for a single day he should be permitted to apostatize. For there is no reason why he should fear to be an apostate for a day, if he does not shrink from being for that time a schismatic or a heretic. ”

“ Now, a man having gone thus far, he comes, in the last place, to be an apostate; for thus to oppose wilfully and maliciously the known truth, is always joined with final and total apostacy: For he that is so far enlightened as to see the evil of sin, and the excellency of Christ and holiness, and hath been made partakers of the Holy Ghost, of his graces and comfort, and tasted of God's love and favour in Jesus Christ, and has some foretaste of the joys of the world to come; for such a one wilfully, spitefully, and maliciously to fail away, he set falls as never to rise more. ”

“ Taxater should throw himself into a difficult and troublesome intrigue in order that an apostate from the inviolable Faith, once for all delivered to the Saints, should escape what might reasonably be regarded as a punishment for her apostacy. ”

“ But they, or the apostles alone, or one of them, would have been abundantly sufficient as a center for gathering the believing from among the apostate. They stood precisely as did Moses in the midst of the congregation of Israel, at the time of the apostasy of the golden calf, saying,—“Who 442is on the Lord’s side? Let him come unto me.”—Ex. xxxii, 26. Hence the style in which the historian of the Acts writes of the converts of Pentecost. ”

“ He will know, moreover, the nature of the apostate angels, and the reason why they have power to flatter in some things those who do not despise them with the whole power of faith, and why they exist for the purpose of deceiving and leading men astray. ”

“ I believe a limited power over man is possessed by [Pg 114] the arch apostate, but it seems to me the period of its physical developement was confined to the early ages of the Christian church, just as the age of miracles was measured and limited by the necessities of the church. ”

“ And how shall one "judge" the apostate "angels," who has become himself an apostate from that forgetfulness of injuries, wdiich is according to the Gospel? "Why do ye not rather suffer wrong?" he says; "why are ye not rather defrauded? Yea, ye do wrong and defraud," [104] manifestly by praying against those who transgress in ignorance, and deprive of the philanthropy and goodness of God, as far as in you lies, those against whom you pray, "and these your brethren,"—not meaning those in the faith only, but also the proselytes. ”

“ Yes, added to the efforts of those who have never been numbered with us, we have had the efforts of apostates to contend with, we have had their malice to encounter, we have had their deep laid schemes to counteract; and, if there has been anything that has been disagreeable connected with our history from the beginning to the present, it has been more especially found in the opposition that we have had to meet from the hands, mouths and pens of those who have been once numbered with us. ”

“ Yet after awhile the Saints at large took hope touching the souls of these; for Bishop Wright, the excellent and able Wild Ram of the Mountains, took occasion to remark one Sabbath in the course of an address delivered in the tabernacle: “And it amazes me, brethren, to note how the spirit has been poured out on the Lamanites. It really does seem as if an Injun jest naturally hates an apostate, and it beats me how they can tell ’em the minute they try to sneak out of this valley of the Lord. They must lie out in them hills jest a-waiting for apostates; and they won’t have anything else ”

“ It is the folly of apostates that they lose the benefit of all they have done in religion, or suffered for it. And, (2.) It is very sad for any to live in an age of services and sufferings, of sabbaths, sermons, and sacraments, in vain; in this case former righteousness shall not be mentioned. ”

“ True confirmation is confirmation of the soul; it is not binding the body by severe penalties on apostates, but binding the soul. The best ministers can do this only by pressing those things which are proper to bind the soul; it is the grace of God, and nothing less, that can effectually confirm the souls of the disciples, and prevent their apostasy. ”

“ Apostates seem to be the greatest mediums in Spritualism, where they have neither order, church, nor Priesthood. These apostates, generally, had fallen into the idea that Jesus, and the apostles and prophets of ancient times, were living in barbarous ages, far behind the civilization of our day, but that they were called upon to open up a wonderful dispensation, and to reveal light far superior to that which had ever been revealed by any prophet who ever lived on the earth. ”

“ Some who have been apostates for years past are beginning to come back to us; and, inasmuch as they did not stand and be valiant for the truth, we are now going to place them in the front ranks, and put them to the test. ”

“ But in the next world, can these sixty or seventy successors stand in the position of the first chosen? No. So it is in regard to the latter-day Apostles. In this Church we have had ordained to the Council of the Twelve Apostles, twenty-eight persons. Six of the original Twelve Apostles apostatized, and three of their successors apostatized, making nine apostates that once had hands laid upon them, ordaining them to the Apostleship. These apostates are mostly dead. We cannot suppose that they can hold an office in eternity which they have forfeited. ”

“ They are unfaithful, they are apostates, with whom God is not well-pleased. They are like the Israelites of old, and to them the High Priest will not appear the second time without sin to their salvation. ”

“ No matter what the disciples did or said, the people were hardened, being led by many priests and false prophets to build up their churches and do all kinds of sinful things. These wicked apostates even beat the true believers of Jesus, but the believers did not fight back. ”