p. 135 | The Religion Needed

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 23, 1882

The Religion Needed.

WE want a religion that bears heavily on the "exceeding sinfulness of sin," and on the exceeding rascality of lying and stealing—that banishes small measures from the counter, small baskets from stalls, pebbles from cotton bags, clay from the paper, sand from sugar, chicory from coffee, alum from bread, and water from the milk cans.

The religion to save the world will not put all the big strawberries at the top and the little ones at the bottom, nor make one half a pair of shoes of good leather and the other half of poor leather; it will not put Jouvin’s stamp on Jenkin’s kid gloves, nor make Paris bonnets in the back room of a Boston milliner shop; nor let a piece of velvet professing to measure twelve yards come to an untimely end in the tenth, nor a spool of silk at twenty yards be nipped in the bud at fourteen and a half; nor all wool delaines and all linen handkerchiefs be amalgamated with clandestine cotton; nor coats made of rags pressed together be sold for legal broadcloth.

It does not put bricks at five dollars into chimneys it contracts to build of seven dollar material; nor smuggle white pine into floors that have paid for hard pine; nor leave yawning cracks in closets where boards ought to join; nor daub the ceilings that ought to be smoothly plastered; nor make window blinds of slats that cannot stand the wind, and paint that cannot stand the sun, and fastenings that may be looked at, but are on no account to be touched.

The religion that is going to sanctify the world pays its debts. It does not consider that forty cents returned for one hundred cents given is according to the gospel, though it may be according to law. It looks on a man who has failed in trade and who continues to live in luxury, as a thief.—Sel.