PULPIT AND PRESS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 3, 1881

PULPIT AND PRESS.

THE most useful members of a church are usually those who would be doing harm if they were not doing good. They cannot be chips in the porridge, they must flavor it one way or another. I know very well if I were not always at work I should be sure either to worry myself or others, for my brains will not imitate the dormouse, and take a long sleep. To have nothing to do would kill some of us outright. Active-minded idlers are a curse to any community. Lazy members of churches, if they have restless dispositions, become critical hearers, grumblers, gossips, heretics, or schismatics. They find pleasure in giving pain. It is fine to see a sluggard lean over a rail and find fault with those who are hard at work in their shirt-sleeves; on a very hot day it is pleasant to sit in a boat and find fault with the two fellows who are rowing so hard that they drip with sweat. Now, you with fault-finding tongues, use your mouths for a better purpose, and we shall be less troubled by you. Spare energy soon runs wild if it be not yoked to the gospel plough. Vines which bear little fruit go all to wood, and many of the branches run over the wall.—C. H. Spurgeon.

A good many people spend all their life hunting for the place in this world which they were intended to fill. They never settle down to anything with any sort of restful or contented feeling. What they are doing now is not by any means the work that is suited to their abilities. They have a sunny ideal of a very noble life which they would like to reach, in which their powers would find free scope, and were they could make a very bright record. But in their present position they cannot do much of anything, and there is little use to try. Their life is a humdrum and prosy routine, and they can accomplish nothing really worthy and beautiful. So they go on discontented with their own lot and sighing for another; and while they sigh the years glide away, and soon they will come to the end, to find that they have missed every opportunity of doing anything worthy of a being in the passage to eternity. The truth is, one's vocation is never some far-of possibility. It is always the simple round of duties that the passing hour brings. No day is commonplace if we only had eyes to see its splendor. There is no duty that comes to our hand but brings to us the possibility of kingly service.—Sunday School Times.

The Reverend Josiah Dwight was the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700. He was not old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers. The "sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the drollery of its expressions. "If unconverted men ever got to Heaven," he said, "they would feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak." Some of his ministerial associates took offense at his eccentricities, and called on a visit of admonition to the offending clergyman.

"Mr. Dwight received these reproofs with great meekness, frankly acknowledged his faults, and promised amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after returning thanks for the brotherly visit and admonition, ‘hoped that they might so hitch their horses on earth that they should never kick in the stables of everlasting salvation.’"—O. W. Holmes, in North American.

THE elasticity of the term "Unitarian," especially in the direction of Liberalism, is well understood, and according to the Examiner and Chronicle, has recently been tested in Massachusetts. "A dispute in the Unitarian church at Leicester has given rise to the question whether a Unitarian is or is not a Christian. The trouble was this: The minister, S. B. Weston, preached a series of discourses on the Bible, Christ, and Unitarianism, in which he held that Unitarians who discard the supernaturalism of the Bible and historical Christianity have no right to call themselves Christians, and declared himself to be non-Christian. In this the people sustained him. But the society has its support from a fund, the conditions of which are that the minister shall ‘faithfully preach those broad and generous views of God which are known by the name of Unitarian.’ The trustees refused to pay any more money to one who was not a Christian. To settle the matter, a committee of referees, composed of the most prominent ministers and laymen of the denomination, was chosen to determine whether Unitarianism was Christian. They decided for Christianity and against Mr. Weston, who must now fall a step lower into the rank of the Free Religionists. But in what pitiable plight is that ‘church’ which has to call a council to declare whether or not it is Christian."