Straining at a Gnat

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 24, 1871

Straining at a Gnat.

“Ye pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.” Matt. 23: 23.

Two noted Greek pirates were once captured and condemned to death at Malta. It was observed that the beef and anchovies among the stores of a captured English ship had alone remained untouched. They were asked the cause of this singular procedure, and replied that it was the time of the great fast of their Church. They would not commit such a sin as tasting of fish or flesh. They were plundering and murdering men, women, and helpless children, but they would not transgress the canons of their church by eating meat upon a fast day. They looked to their strict observance of these things as a merit, for which God would grant them success in their infamous work.

A man came down from the hills to a Neapolitan priest to confess a sin which lay heavy upon his conscience. In the busy season of Lent, while engaged in making cheese, some of the whey had fallen upon his lips, and miserable man that he was, he had swallowed it.

“Free my distressed conscience,” he besought, “from its agonies by absolving me from my guilt.”

“Have you no other sins to confess?” asked the priest.

“No, I do not know that I have committed any other.”

“We often hear of robberies and murders committed in your mountains. Have you never been concerned in these?”

“Yes, but all of us do these things. We never account them as crimes needing confession and absolution.”

We may smile at such a type of conscientiousness, but if we search strictly our own hearts, may we not find there some similar “straining at a gnat,” which, with our greater light, is far more inexcusable? Are we not all tempted to think more of a strict outward observance of our religious duties, than of deep, inward, hourly communion with Jesus?