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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 4, 1871

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 37, No. 16.

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Religion.

RELIGION is not a duty, it is a necessity. You might as well talk of the duty of breathing, or the duty of having the pulse beat, as to talk of the duty of being religious. It is a duty to breathe, to be sure, and it is a duty to have the pulse beat; but we do not talk of those things as being duties. It is one of the indispensable necessities that we should breathe, and that our pulse should beat. And I regard religious life as not only a duty, but a necessity. You cannot be a man and not be a Christian. And yet everything that makes you relatively better than your fellow-men is an indication that you are so far on the way toward a Christian manhood.
No man can complain that his calling takes him off from religion; his calling itself and his very worldly employment in honest trades and offices are a serving of God; and if it be moderately pursued, will have void spaces enough for prayers and retirements of a more spiritual religion. God has given every man work enough to do, and there shall be no room for idleness; and yet has so ordered the world that there shall be space for devotion. He that has the fewest businesses of the world is called upon to spend more time in the dressing of his soul; and he that has the most affairs, may so order them that they shall be a service of God; while at certain periods they are blessed with prayers and actions of religion, and all day long are hallowed by a holy intention.
Impressions are often made, but how is any practical effect to be gained? When Daguerre was working at his sun pictures, the great difficulty was to fix them. The light came and imprinted the image, but when the table was drawn from the camera, the image had vanished. Our lamentation is like his—our want, the same—a fixing solution that shall arrest and detain the fugitive impressions. He discovered the chemical powder which turned the evanescent into the durable. There is divine agency at hand which can fix the truth upon the heart of man.—Sel.