A Happy Charity

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 26, 1882

A Happy Charity.

Eating and drinking and gambling are the strong passions of this age. If you wish to raise money to carry on some charitable or religious enterprise, you must get up a festival, a supper, or a raffle, and you will have no difficulty in securing an attendance. If your festival is not costly; if your oysters are lonesome in the soup; if the grab-bag is supplied with worthless and costless trinkets, or if the hilarious parson knows just where the ring lies in the cake, and can secure it for future service on other like occasions, there will be a handsome profit, and all will be satisfied, as the abundance of fun will cause the victims to forget that they have been cheated on a petty scale. It will not add to the spirituality of the church, nor cause the fun-loving crowd to respect the gospel of Christ. But it will help pay church debts, and give Deacon Hardcash the double satisfaction of seeing the church prosper and his bank account increase at the same time; and enable Sister McFlimsy to spend a little more for bonnets and ruffles, than she could if she had to give a reasonable proportion to the good cause in which she really thinks her heart is so deeply interested.

And this proceeding is as philosophical as it is religious. So all must have thought who heard the address recently delivered in this State, at a festival which was got up for the benefit of orphans. The speaker said:—

“Those present could devour a bowl full of oysters with the happy thought that every oyster was contributing to the comfort of some orphan.”

This happy thought will no doubt be seized upon and perpetuated. At a raffle or church game to raise funds for missionary purposes how it would inspire religious zeal to think that every throw of the dice might convert some little heathen! When charity can be dispensed and religion extended in this manner, there is hope that the millennium will soon come.

And all this passes for Christianity. We once held meetings several weeks in an eastern village, when a devoted lady deplored our coming to that place. She said we had done great injury to the cause of Christ, for the festivals were not half so well attended as before the people heard us! Her judgment was according to the popular standard. Such religion and such religious bodies are described in Isa. 1:4–6. Truly the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head, there is no soundness in it.