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Lard On Apostasy

A falling away will occur, and the iniquity which will induce it is at this moment at work. The sturdy love for the primitive faith which characterized the early preachers in the reformation is cooling in men who still linger in our ranks and call us brethren...

In the first place, they are intensely sentimental; rather, they are intensely transcendental. They are very clerical in bearing, soft in speech, and languid and effeminate in spirit. They are poets and ladies men, exqisites in parlors, and never condemn anything except their brethren...they are beautiful men, and preach beautiful sermons. Their prayers are beautiful things, their songs, beautiful songs. Moreover, they are very abstract men, and the aesthetic, the moral, the true, the beautifil, and the good are very fond phrases in their bloodless and virtuous lips...

In the second place, they have an enormous fondness for sects and sectarians; and scowl on no one so indignantly as on the brother who dares to speak against them....They seldom speak of their brethren except to disparage them; and never of other parties of the day except to laud them...

Another circumstance, very significant to my mind, marks the career of these men. With hardly an exception, they indorse and admire ECCE HOMO. And it must be confessed, no book has appeared within the last 25 years which embodies so much of their faith, or expresses it so well as that book. The man who indorses ECCE HOMO is the enemy of Jesus Christ and of the cause He died to establish. With me, nothing is more certain than this....(Ecce Hommo was a book that made Jesus a mere man, and stripped Him of His divinity...awg)

To brethren everywhere I say, see to it that your preachers are kept to the book. Allow no departure from it; and all will be well. (Wayne Goforth found this article in Lard's Quarterly, Vol 4, Oct. 1867...pp 347,348)