p. 204 | What Has Hindered by James White

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, Cal. · May 6, 1875

What Has Hindered.

By James White

WHAT has most retarded the cause from the very first has been a want of real faith in the message on the part of our people, and in the integrity of those whom the Lord has employed to carry it forward. Satan's most powerful artillery against those who have had to venture out in this work by faith, and take great responsibilities, has been the feelings of jealousy which he has succeeded in creating in the minds of those who have been so far from God that he could tempt them at pleasure. In many jealousy has ripened into rebellion, and not a few well-meaning people, at several stages of the cause, would become leavened, more or less with the leaven of malice. These things have brought crises in the cause, and generally some loss of members, and painful detentions of the great work.

But God is the same gracious author of truth and righteousness. Human nature, in all its weaknesses, is the same. And Satan is the same. And, as we near the final triumphant close of the work, the determined general of the powers of darkness does not appear to lose either courage or vigilance. This may be necessary after all to prove and perfect the true and faithful who come out of great tribulation and stand in white before the throne of Heaven, having washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

But the Lord warns his disciples in these words: "It is impossible but that offences will come; but woe unto him through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones." Luke 17 : 1, 2. And no offence is so offensive, and no wound is so deep, as that coming from those who stand in the same church relations. "For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him."

And yet the toilers must toil on in hope and courage in the Lord. He knows every heart, and sooner or later will vindicate the right, and reward the faithful.

Some apparently regard it a virtue to be profound doubters, and finished complainers. And they seem to entertain the false idea that they can enter the eternal city of the saved, while all the way the greatest burden of their souls appears to be to look to the right and left for something to stumble over, and complain of. While constantly searching for something to detain them, they remind us of a spiritless horse, urged into town by the driver's whip, anxiously watching for a hitching post. We make these painful remarks as a warning to those who are not fully consecrated to the Lord and to his work. J. W.