Bad Medicine

I have on my shelf an old medicine bottle, a 19th-century artifact. Its contents supposedly purified the blood and gave new life to the imbiber.

In the old days, the purveyors of such quackery often had to be quite mobile, ever seeking out fresh, vulnerable prey.

I see the same phenomenon with those sad people whose goal in life is to destroy the LDS Church. Everlastingly, restlessly, they roam the Internet, they drop off pamphlets in classrooms, they seek to shake faith. Everlastingly, they pretend as if their arsenal of cherry-picked old quotes torn from the Journal of Discourses or other obscure writings of the early Restoration prophets, are something new and shocking. Usually, they are utterly silent on whether any attempt at refutation has ever been made of their claims.

What is the result? Most Latter-day Saints ignore them. A few have their faith shaken. Of those, a handful may then move on to some other Christian church. The attackers must hope and pray that the methodology they used to poison the testimony of such people will not in turn, be used by them, in time, against whatever other brand of Christianity they embrace.

Others drop into numbed inactivity or even embrace atheism. What then, has been the gain for Christ?