“You shall not follow a crowd to do evil” (Ex. 23:2)

Neither names nor numbers have anything to do with determining what is truth. It is no more mighty nor to be accepted more readily when presented by ten thousand princes than when maintained by a single humble laboring man. And there is no more presumptive evidence that ten thousand men have the truth than that one has it. Every man on earth may be the possessor of just as much of the truth as he is willing to use, and no more.

He who would act the pope, thinking to hold a monopoly of the truth and compel people to come to him for it, giving it out here and withholding it there, loses all the truth that he ever had (if he really had any). Truth and popery cannot exist together. No pope, or man with a popish disposition, has the truth. As soon as a man receives the truth, he ceases to be a pope. If the pope of Rome should become converted and be a disciple of Christ, that very hour he would vacate the papal seat.

Just as there is no man who has a monopoly of truth, so there are no places to which people must necessarily go in order to find it. The fact that truth was first proclaimed in a certain place does not prove that it can be found only there, or that it can be found there at all. In fact, the last places in the world to go to with the expectation of finding truth are the cities where the gospel was preached in the first centuries after Christ, as Jerusalem.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a place that was “little among the thousands of Judah” (Micah 5:2). Nearly all His life He lived in a little town of so poor repute that a man in whom there was no guile said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” It is no farther to heaven from the smallest village or lonely cabin that it is from the largest city or the bishop’s palace. “The High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity whose name is Holy” dwells “with him who has a contrite and humble spirit” (Isa. 57: 15).

Waggoner, The Glad Tidings, PP. 34,35