A Good Comparison

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 14, 1882

A Good Comparison.

THINGS that seem very simple and eminently reasonable to one experienced in the ways of civilized life, would seem inexplicable, if not actually silly, to an untutored savage. Take, for example, our postal arrangements. Suppose an Indian chief, who had never known anything of such a matter, should be with us while we were proposing to send a message to, and get an answer from, a friend across the continent. He would see us take a piece of paper, trace on it a number of crooked marks, fold the paper and fasten it in a paper pocket, trace a few more black marks outside, carry it to a lamp-post, and push it into a small opening in a box fastened there, and then return to our house, telling him we would wait for a stranger to come to our door, bringing a similar paper pocket covering another piece of paper, on which there would be marks giving an answer to the message we had sent our far-off friend. What a mystery this would be to him; and how difficult it would be to get into his mind the idea of the great Government above us, through the agents of which communication could be kept up between any one of fifty millions of people, and any other of the number, from gulf to lakes and from sea to sea. And how much more difficult it would be for him to comprehend the fact that through the relations of that Government to the rest of the world, any one of those fifty millions of people could be in special communication with any citizen of all the hundreds of millions of citizens of all the countries of all the earth! The simple faith in the power and the unfailing fidelity of that Government, which we would display in stepping out from our home to thrust that bit of paper into the opening of that little iron box against the lamp-post, might seem to him like blind superstition or unreasoning presumption. Yet he perhaps would be a wise and powerful chieftain in his own range of experience and conviction. His trouble would be in his total unfamiliarity with our sphere of thought and life. He would, in fact, be as completely off a fair basis of judgment as is the unbelieving scientist, who sees a citizen of the spiritual kingdom dropping on his knees and speaking a few simple words of large request in a low quiet tone, in the firm conviction that the Government he serves will see to it that his message is carried safely beyond the stars, and that a favorable answer is returned to it. Scientist and savage are alike in their inability to comprehend that which is utterly foreign to their field of sight and knowledge. And there is a spiritual realm outside of and beyond the natural realm of both savage and scientist. "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned."—S. S. Times.