p. 130 | BURIED GIANTS

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 24, 1879

BURIED GIANTS.

“Many a man would do good, if he had not a superabundance of means of doing it; many a spiritual giant is buried under mountains of gold.” Such is the suggestive sentence we came across recently, and how true!

Thus some are buried under the very excess of religious privileges. Sermons, so many and so good; prayer-meetings, so frequent and interesting; books, so abundant and attractive; Christian communion, so sweet and constant,—all may, and often do minister to self-indulgence and spiritual sloth. Enjoyment takes the place of enterprise. Means of grace are made an end. A surfeit of these good things, without exercise, makes a dyspeptic, and hence a feeble Christian. The giant is so overloaded with armor that his strength becomes weakness.

Others are buried under the very wealth of opportunities. There are so many ways of doing good that they see not which to choose; there are so many openings for influence that their very multiplicity is an embarrassment; there are so many calls for laborers that they know not which to heed. And so in the endeavor to do everything they accomplish nothing, or they stand still while the daily train of opportunities rushes past, never to return, instead of seizing the living present and doing with their might what their hands find to do; buried under a mountain of opportunities.

Others are buried under a load of refinement and social conventionalism. They have a “position in society” to maintain. The family has fashionable connections. It may not be quite “genteel” to visit the squalid abodes of poverty, to confront vice in its haunts, to be found engaged in personal activities for the salvation of men. Once in a while they will compromise with conscience by a check to some popular charity, and do their work by proxy. Rank and wealth thus become the withes wherewith these giants are bound. The very elements of influence, providentially conferred to enhance their power for good, are perverted into the occasion for non-action, if not wrong action. “A living dog”—an obscure but active Christian—“is better than a dead lion”—a gifted but lifeless disciple.

Others are buried under mountains of gold. The instances are not rare of liberal, active Christians growing covetous and indolent in the measure in which they are prospered in worldly affairs. The very process of accumulation, without proportionate charities, induces selfishness; time becomes money, they cannot afford personal activity in the cause of Christ. Wealth brings luxury, and luxury breeds ease; both engross time and heart. The Dives of business becomes a Lazarus in charity. The giant dwindles into a pygmy.

It may seem an anomaly, but the truth, we apprehend, is this—that as in the inspired record, both of the Old Testament and the New, the spiritual heroes of the world were not those whose gifts and opportunities made them such, so in all ages the men of achievement have been for the most part men who, like the Captain of salvation, have been made perfect in suffering. They are men who have been trained in the school of want and difficulty, men who have hewed their way through innumerable obstacles, men who have seized the crown by valiantly wielding the sword and bearing the cross.

Surely the men of renown, like Moses and Abraham and Elijah, and the Luthers and Howards and Wesleys of more modern times, had no hothouse training, no surfeiting of religious privileges. Our men of benevolence are not those who have a windfall of a fortune in the way of bequest, but who have steadily and by hard toil wrought business success. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.” It is the fidelity with the one pound that gains the ten pounds.—Christian Weekly.