The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials: Volume 2 - Ellen G. White

idolatry by placing the commandments of men
where God and His requirements alone should be.
The chastisement of the Lord was upon the people
because they were idolizing things, sentiments, and
ideas of their own creating.
In the days of Christ, under the guise of the
perverse and most rigorous devotion to the forms
and the traditions of that which they claimed to be
the Mosaic system, the real [meaning of] the
precious ceremonies proceeding from God had
become obscured. The spiritual and eternal import
of the truth in regard to the work and mission of
Jesus Christ to our world, prefigured in the
sacrificial offerings, became mixed and mingled
with the false theories of men. These false theories
were the great barriers to the correct understanding
of doctrines, and to practical piety. They clung to
the type, the shadow, rejecting the antitype and the
substance. The deceiving power of Satan wrought
upon unconsecrated minds to fasten them in blind
suppositions. Their incorrect interpretations
fastened them hopelessly in error, because the real,
true light shining upon their way was accounted as