p. 104 | What is Needed

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 12, 1872

What is Needed.

REV. MR. MURRAY, in his lecture on “Deacons,” says that the church needs life if it would direct the age, and not be left behind in the march of improvement. It had been represented by dyspeptic and consumptive men long enough. He hoped to live to see the day when a stoop in the back would be unorthodox, and a narrow chest put a theological student at an immense disadvantage in candidating. A church should examine its pastor as closely touching hygiene as touching his theological tenets. He was brought up among people like those he was describing, and he had preached in a parish where the blast of a steam whistle never sounded, where to skate was unministerial, and to slide down hill a sin; where the crack of his rifle caused as much excitement in the church as the last trump would, and where, if he took a step over fourteen and a half inches from heel to toe, it made the sewing society lively for two weeks. Large-hearted, level-headed men in the churches must come to the front.—Sel.