Virgil (70-19 B.C.), in his celebrated poem, the Eneid, draws a vivid picture of the ancient pagan prophetess SPEAKING WITH TONGUES. He describes the quickly changing color, disheveled hair, panting breast, apparent increase of stature as the god, in reality a demon, draws near, filling the prophetess with what they called the " divine afflatus," when the voice of the medium lost its " mortal's ring." Note this was before the Christian era and in pagan circles.
Clemens Alexandrinus, one of the early fathers of the Church wrote, "Plato (born 427 B.C.) attributes a peculiar dialect to the gods inferring this from dreams and oracles, and especially from demoniacs, WHO DO NOT SPEAK THEIR OWN LANGUAGE OR DIALECT, BUT THAT OF THE DEMONS, WHO ARE ENTERED INTO THEM" (Miscellanies, Bk. i., p. 443).
We would draw the reader's very special attention to this testimony. Here is a heathen, living in. the fifth century before the birth of Christ, knowing more of Spiritism than the late Sir Conan Doyle did, or the late Sir Oliver Lodge. He under-Stood how the speaking with tongues may belly the personating demon, using the tongue of the dupe, whose body he possesses. The demon knows a language that his victim does not know, and, therefore, using the tongue of his victim, there is the speaking with tongues. Let this example be kept well in mind as to the possible imitation of Pentecostal speaking with tongues. It is strange that a heathen should furnish us with this information, when intelligent men today are blind to these facts, even though they have the Word of God in their hands.
When we come to the Christian era, there arose in the second century, one, Montanus, who claimed to be a divinely inspired prophet. When speaking under the power of a spirit, he would blasphemously assert, " I am the Lord God Omnipotent, who has descended into a man." He and his followers SPOKE WITH TONGUES, and professed that the prophecy of Joel, quoted by the Apostle Peter on the day of Pentecost, was being fulfilled. The spread of Montanism in Asia Minor compelled the Church to take action. The condemnation of the movement, alas! only strengthened it. It gained adherents in Italy, France and North Africa, where Tertullian of Carthage was won over. A synod at Iconium in 235, and the Council of Constantinople in 381 condemned it. By the beginning of the fifth century it began gradually to die out.
During the Reformation Period, between 1517 and 1648, there sprang up a sect in Germany, in which SPEAKING WITH TONGUES and MIRACULOUS HEALING were claimed. The outbreak was marked by the wildest excesses of immorality. Fanatics roamed through the woods in complete nudity. Polygamy was freely practiced.
About 1650 arose the "French Prophets" in the Forest of Cevennes. They claimed apostolic gifts and SPOKE WITH TONGUES. Scenes of the wildest confusion were witnessed. They would roll on the floor, foam at the mouth, go into fits of "holy" laughter of long continuance. They professed that babes of fifteen months were filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied. This movement was marked by gross immorality, and their places of assembly were designated as "public places of prostitution."
The Mormons with their one-time vile polygamy profess to SPEAK WITH TONGUES, and to practice divine healing.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the so-called "unknown tongues" manifested themselves in the west of Scotland. The celebrated Edward Irving, minister of the Caledonian Church, Regent Square, London, heard of these happenings, became interested, and got into touch with the movement.
His church in London soon became the scene of tongues-speaking. Earnest Christians, who longed for a revival of Divine power in their midst at a time when things were very dead in the professing church, were attracted. But the bulk of his congregation did not sympathize with the form that things were taking, and in 1830 he was solemnly excommunicated by the Presbytery of London.
The Catholic Apostolic Church was the result of this influence, which exists in a moribund condition to this day. One of his best known associates was Mr. Robert Baxter, described by the late Sir Robert Anderson, who knew him personally, as "a typical English parliamentary lawyer, reserved, slow of speech, and noted for soundness of judgment."
The writer has in his possession a reprint of "Narrative of Facts," written by Mr. Baxter in 1832. In it he vividly describes how he and others, men and women of culture, were drawn into the movement, how it seemed as if they were, indeed, under the mighty power of God when they spoke in tongues. He testifies that the spirit of praise to the Lord was strong within them, of their ecstasy of soul, of the mighty uplifting of spirit that occurred. It seemed as if there could be no mistake. This must be "the latter rain," this must be "that which was spoken by the prophet Joel."
Then he gives the painful account of how little by little he began to see the true character of the movement. Prophecies were uttered under the influence, as they supposed of the Spirit of God. When the time came for them to be fulfilled nothing happened. Other things aroused his suspicion.
Baxter was an honest man, a true child of God, and in his anxiety God gave him deliverance from what he found out clearly was a latter-day delusion of Satan.
He uses language in describing his deliverance that lacks nothing in clearness and directness. Satan, as "an angel of light," was behind the great delusion.
He wrote, "Indeed the whole work is a mimicry of the gifts of the Spirit—the utterance of tongues, a mimicry of the gift of tongues—and so of the prophesyings, and all the other works of power. It is Satan as an angel of light, imitating, as far as permitted, the Holy Spirit of God. According to the degree of unfaithfulness of the individuals or congregations with which it is present, so, I am persuaded, is the degree of power and consequent deceit which is put forth "
(Narrative of Facts, p. 45).
The emphasis on words in the above quotation is as it appears in Mr. Baxter's book. The extract itself is worth careful consideration. It is the product of a mind that had been genuinely deceived. He himself had SPOKEN WITH TONGUES repeatedly. He believed with all his soul that he had come in for the outpouring of "the latter rain," that the fulfillment of Joel's prophecy had arrived, that he was indeed baptized with the Holy Spirit.
Was not his soul lifted up to a heavenly ecstasy? Was he not led to a deeper enjoyment of the Scriptures? Was he not led in earnest prayer? He was. Were these things wrong? Yet he found that mixed up with them, demoniacal power and agency were at work. In short, the movement, spite of good things connected with it, was a snare of Satan. Satan had depths in it of which at first he had no suspicion. But when things began to develop, such as the fanaticism of the movement, the "holy" laughter, the unfulfilled prophecies, etc., he was too sincere a Christian to be duped. Hence his deliverance.
Irving himself promulgated blasphemous views of the Person of Christ, clearly not the result of the teaching of the Spirit of God, if he had received the special healing, as he claimed. Such heretical teaching cleanly shows the cloven foot, and reveals in a very distinct way whence the movement emanated.
America, the land of origin of so many anti-Christian sects, is overrun with Pentecostalists of various shades. They all sprang from a modest beginning. In the month of April, 1906, in a mission hall in Azusa. Street, Los Angeles, California, a band of colored folk had heard of a man in Kansas upon whom a remarkable power had fallen, and who was apparently speaking with tongues. Colored people are naturally very excitable, and these folks in Los Angeles held nightly meetings, crying earnestly to God that the same manifestations might be theirs.
At last the "power" fell upon them. One after another of them experienced this strange possession, resulting in their pouring forth a torrent of words in an unknown tongue, which was hailed by them as the ushering in of another Pentecost.
This excited a great deal of attention. Mission workers, ministers, Christians of all kinds, flocked to inquire into these strange happenings. The meetings went on for months, and hundreds claimed to have received the "power."
The movement quickly caught on and spread to other parts. It traveled to Britain, Germany, Norway, Sweden, India, Australia and to many other parts.
Of late divisions have occurred in the movement, and we are treated to the unedifying spectacle of one section vigorously denouncing the other sections. They all claim to "speak with tongues," but each section contends that their manifestations are the only genuine ones, and that the manifestations of their opponents are of the devil.
In the year 1907 there was at Sunderland an outburst of what was claimed as Pentecostal gifts. The leaders in this were a clergyman of the Church of England and his wife, the Rev. and Mrs. A. A. Boddy.
The late A. T. Schofield, M.D., the well-known author, investigated this particular movement, and gave us his experience:- "As some of my family had joined another movement of ' Speaking with Tongues ' so rife in America, and I was writing a book on Christian Sanity, with which it seemed so seriously to clash, I determined to investigate it. Its chief exponent in England was Mr. Boddy, a clergyman of the highest repute, and vicar of the parish church of Bishopwearmouth for twenty years. I determined to go down there, and the vicar very kindly asked me to stay at his house. I told him that, as I might have to write against the movement, I would prefer an hotel, but he insisted on my coming to the vicarage, as he was as anxious for the truth as I was. When I arrived his wife welcomed me, and told me that her husband had just gone to the prayer-meeting in the Church Room. She herself had just cast the devil from a young curate of a very fashionable church. He had come to the town to inquire into the movement, but could not get from his hotel to the Church. He said his legs would not act! so that day in desperation he had got into a cab and was driven to the vicarage, and had now gone to the prayer-meeting. She had laid her hands on his shoulders, and first of all cast out the evil spirit. She then prayed for the gift of the Holy Spirit, and immediately he had begun to speak with tongues, and had gone to the meeting full of joy. I hastily ate my supper and followed him. I have never heard such beautiful sounds as met my ear when I opened the door. Some seventy to a hundred people were on their knees and seemed to be crooning up and down the scale, sometimes loud and sometimes soft, and mostly in a plaintive minor key. There were no words, and the sound was of a number of Aeolian harps in a breeze. I was told that this was the 'Tongue of Angels' as distinguished from that of men, which I should hear presently. Swayed by some common impulse they all arose suddenly and took their seats. Five or six then stood in different parts of the room and prayed simultaneously. I seated myself by the young clergyman, and soon he spoke with tongues,' seemingly to become unconscious and in a sort of fit, rapidly gabbling a stream of incoherent sounds: I listened to him most attentively, and am convinced that it was no language on earth. The rest were calmly singing hymns, and took no notice of him. After ten minutes he suddenly regained consciousness and joined in the hymn. A girl behind me was also gabbling unconsciously. A tall man near them suddenly rose, and poured out apparently a stream of the same ' gibberish.' It seems, however, that here I was wrong, for in another part of the room a little missionary stood
up saying that he had just returned from a branch of the Upper Congo where a small tribe spoke the
language they had just heard! The vicar then rose, a most incongruous figure in such a scene, and said
that though he could not speak with tongues, his two youngest children spoke fluently in Chinese. This
I succeeded in having stopped. To see such a noble figure sanction such scenes filled me with distress.
Mrs. Boddy then rose and declared that she had been speaking in tongues all the time, and would now tell
us what she said, and gave a short discourse. After this there was less restraint, the proceedings became
more exciting, and sometimes, to me, painfully ludicrous. The whole seemed to be an outburst of some form of hysteria; I certainly could not regard it as the work of the Holy Spirit, though without doubt
this was the view taken by everyone in the room " (Behind the Brass Plate, pp. 248-250).
More than one connected with this movement withdrew from it as discerning that the movement was not of the Spirit of God, and very little is heard of it today.
We have now placed before the reader some little account of movements that have sprung up from time to time, claiming to be the revival of Pentecostal gifts. In no case have we found that the movement can command the respect of a sober Christian mind, that is governed by the Word of God. The following remarks by one, who has made a very -exact examination of the movements in America, are well worthy of consideration.
The Rev. P. Wiseman, of Canada, writes, " If people without grace or power can speak in tongues, if a Mohammedan in his religious frenzy can speak in tongues, as is reputed he does; if a Mormon with his diabolical practices of polygamy can speak with tongues; if people can change their doctrines at will, and believe as they like and still speak in tongues; then speaking in tongues is no evidence that one has the sacred experience received by the apostles and disciples on the Day of Pentecost. That which may be possessed without grace or power cannot be an evidence of either."