Independence of Simplicity by Philip Giddings

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 12, 1910

Independence of Simplicity

By Philip Giddings

PHILIP GIDDINGS

WE are cumbered with too much. From the condition of upright simplicity in which God made man, sin and “civilization” have sought out many inventions, and wrought out as many complications. There are multitudes of things which we think we can not get along with without. Our cultivated whims have become wants that bind us. And there are those who glory in the number of things they must have, rather than in their fewness, and seem to rate their own importance accordingly. You would laugh at the swimmer who prides himself that he can swim in a one-thousand-dollar buoy suit, but can’t swim at all without! There’s a lightness, a freeness, to him who is not weighted with trappings. He feels that pleasure analogous to what those feel who need no crutches.

The writer can picture no scene so lovely as Adam and Eve in the garden under bowers; nothing so peacefully scenic as the river, going out of Eden to water the garden, meandering through meadowy embankments. Civilization’s artificial rose may be admirable for execution, but it lacks life and freshness and fragrance.

When Diocletian was recalled to his seat in the government which he had resigned, he replied, “If you could see the cabbages I raise in my garden, you wouldn’t ask me to take a throne.”

“Back to the land!” “Back to the country!” is a refreshing reactionary cry of some of the weary multitudes, who are sensible, at least, of part of what’s the matter.

The time will come (and with some, now is) when people will take pride in what they can do without, rather than in what they must have. A man, boasting

against a poorer man, once said: “Look here: I have just paid the doctor five dollars for medicine, but you don’t have a cent.” But better be well than only well-off. Better is he who can sleep on Bethel’s hard ground, with harder stone for pillow, and dream of angels, than he who can’t do so even on a spring mattress.

Of all men that should be free from encumbrances, is the soldier—the Christian soldier. “No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life.” He has to strip off many of those things called “conveniences.” It has been a strange observation that some think themselves first-class soldiers because they need a soft place. But Paul’s description of “a good soldier of Jesus Christ” is that he “endure hardness.” The worldly soldier should not outbrave the heavenly soldier, though we fear he has often done so. A bishop, on returning to England, being asked in a meeting if the aborigines in the forest land had been evangelized, answered: “I am sorry to say, ministers are not so willing to fight Christ’s battles as the king’s soldiers are to fight the nation’s battles. We can not get men who are willing to go where the comforts of life are not easily accessible”! What a shame!

But Paul, next to the Master himself, has left us a noble example of this independence of things. We can well imagine the once lofty position of this Jewish master, who profited in the Jews’ religion above many his equals, and who, as for the flesh, had more than any other man wherein he might trust; education and culture had given him the right to as fine a taste as any other; but all these he was willing, if necessary, to forego; not because he was a cheaper man, but because God’s cause was dearer. Lawfully pleasant things were due to him as to any other, but if they were not expedient to running his errand, they must go. He knew how to abound, as well as how to be abased: everywhere and in all things, he was instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. Phil. 4:12. With lawful claims on “all things,” he would “not be brought under the power of any.” 1 Cor. 6:12. “For the gospel’s sake,” unto the Jews he would become as a Jew to gain the Jews; to the weak he would become as weak to gain the weak; he would become all things to all men, that he might by all means save some.

As I read of the systematic benevolence and personal economy of Wesley, parting with his salary as he did, and contenting himself with necessities, I saw a man who had the master-key to missionary expediency,—a man who had unfettered himself so as to be fleeter in running his race.

And as I notice some of our own missionaries,—men who have foregone things dear to them at home, to line themselves up to a situation in foreign lands, adopting primitive methods as long as necessary to pioneer through the missionary jungle,—I observe they have achieved a success and left an influence corresponding to their zealous hardihood.

These are men who have not simply contented themselves as “war correspondents” at some safe distance from the firing, writing about other men’s fights, but who, dashing themselves into the midst of the fray, with their swords in action, record again “acts of the apostles.”

“John was a type of the last-day messengers of God. . . . They will not be concerned about wearing soft raiment, nor will they live luxuriously. They will be content to be voices of God, crying in the wilderness of sin.”

Many things men boast of as marks of superiority might be, after all, only badges of our shame, evidences of the loss of our first estate. Let us not glory in our shame, nor introduce our conceit into the gospel. Let us fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtility, so our minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. 2 Cor. 11:3.

Roseau, West Indies.