Third: The MARK OF THE BEAST pt.9 Those 2 Great Errors of Gog and Magog

And there followed another angel, saying,
Babylon is fallen, is fallen,
that great city,
because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.
Revelation 14:8

"Babylon meets with this spiritual fall "because she made all nations drink of the wine of wrath [not anger, but intense passion] of her fornication." 

There is but one thing to which this can refer, and that is false doctrines. She has corrupted the pure truths of God's word, and made the nations drunken with pleasing fables.

The two great errors,
--the immortality of the soul
--and Sunday sacredness,
--While the former lays the foundation of spiritualism,
--the latter creates a bond of sympathy with Rome.

Among the doctrines she teaches contrary to the word of God,
may be mentioned the following:
*The change of the Sabbath of the fourth commandment, the seventh day, into the festival of Sunday as the rest day of the Lord and a

memorial of His resurrection, a memorial which has never been commanded, and can by no possible means appropriately commemorate that event.
Fathered by heathenism as "the wild solar holiday of all pagan times," Sunday was made to destroy a memorial which the great God had set up to commemorate His own magnificent creative work, and erect another in its state to commemorate the resurrection of Christ, for which there was no occasion, as the Lord Himself had already provided a memorial for that purpose in baptism by immersion.

*The doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul.
This also was derived from the pagan world,
and the "Fathers of the church" became the foster-fathers of this pernicious doctrine as a part of divine truth.
This error nullifies the two great Scripture doctrines of the resurrection and the general judgment, and furnishes an open door to modern spiritism.
--From it have sprung such other evil doctrines as
the conscious state of the dead,

saint worship,

mariology,

purgatory,

reward at death,

prayers and baptisms for the dead,

eternal torment, and

universal salvation.

The doctrine that the saints, as disembodied spirits, find their eternal inheritance in faraway, indefinable regions, "beyond the bounds of

time and space." 

Thus multitudes have been turned away from the Scriptural view that this present earth is to be destroyed by fire at the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men, and that from its ashes the voice of Omnipotence will evoke a new earth, which will be the future everlasting kingdom of glory, and which the saints will possess as their eternal inheritance.
*Sprinkling instead of immersion, the latter being the only Scriptural mode of baptism, and a fitting memorial of the burial and resurrection of our Lord, for which purpose it was designed.
By the corruption of this ordinance and its destruction as a memorial of the resurrection of Christ, the way was prepared for the substitution of something else for this purpose--the Sunday rest day.

Uriah Smith