No Religion to Spare

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 26, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 13.

No Religion to Spare.

A QUAINT old city missionary, speaking in charitableness of a starveling Christian in a flock he tended, said: "Well, I think he's got enough religion to save himself; but he hasn't a bit to spare." And that phrasing was an unconscious parallel with Jeremy Taylor's statement: "A man of an ordinary piety is like Gideon's fleece, wet in its own locks, but it could not water a poor man's garden." A Christian of that sort bears about the same relation to a man of God who is "complete, furnished completely unto every good work," that a penniless tramp bears to a well-to-do citizen in the community at large. Even if a Christian tramp has barely enough of the bread of life to keep himself from starving, he will do better by sharing that scanty portion with others than by consuming it all himself. It was when the widow of Zarephath had only enough for one more meal, which she purposed to eat and then die, that the call came to her to give—not of her abundance, but out of her poverty, to another. Had she sought only to live, she would have died; but deciding to give, she was enabled to live through all the famine season. Go thou and do likewise.—S. S. Times.