MAN-WORSHIP | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 25, 1880

MAN-WORSHIP.

A SUITABLE rebuke was given to the modern sentiment by an eccentric but devout Christian, who went to church one Sunday and was met by an usher with this remark, "Come to hear the Rev. Mr.—? he is out of town to-day."

"No, sir," said my earnest friend, "I have come to worship God."

There is altogether too much of man-worship in our holy temples. We run after such or such a preacher whose talent or whose peculiarities may attract, and we put far below this motive, the idea of true, sublime, all-absorbing adoration of the great Being who commands our highest reverence and love.

The desire for novelties in religion, and for diversion in the house of God is something that we should check in ourselves the moment we become conscious of its existence.

To hear and see some new thing—this is the bane of our present age. It destroys all stability in our young people, and takes from them the deep, earnest spirituality that ought always to belong to a simple, godly life.

A pastor now-a-days can scarcely know what sort of food to prepare for his flock, so common is it for half of them to forage in other fields. The old-time clergy had a better supervision of those committed to their charge, and the laity had a wholesome respect for their spiritual teachers, whom they regarded as sent of God for their soul's good, and not to be set up as idols in the place of the great Jehovah.—Selected.