Men and Things | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 24, 1872

Men and Things.

HABIT MAKES CHARACTER.

A WRITER says:—

“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”

It would be hard to tell more truth in so few words. How careful, then, we ought to be to form right habits. Indeed, life and character are made up of habits. These are being formed every day. How careful, then, ought young people to be of even their smallest actions.

A PARABLE.

My experience in church affairs teaches me that the following illustration is very much to the point; and I call especial attention of the class here illustrated to the truth it teaches—

“A very hard-hearted clapper in an old church tower professed the intensest distress because its bell was hopelessly cracked. Many people thought it a pitiable position, and wished the sad-hearted clapper a better bell. But just then the ghost of ancient Diogenes, the sage, floated in through the window, and whistled most angrily: ‘Master Clapper; cease your noise, and remember, in the first place, you cracked the bell; and, secondly, nobody would have known it had you not told them.’ I have observed often that those who bemoan divisions in a church are they who make them; and I also observed sometimes that they who make them are most ready to publish the fact; I have observed another fact, viz., that all clappers are not of as good metal as the bells they crack.—Baptist Weekly.”

Now you grumbling, faultfinding brother or sister in the church, the probabilities are, nine out of ten, that you are the very one that has made all the trouble and division in the church of which you are lamenting so much. After having divided and broken up the church, then you very piously go around and complain of it to everybody.

LIQUOR TRAFFIC IN ENGLAND.

It is a sad fact which comes to us across the water, that, notwithstanding all the efforts of temperance societies, the power of Christianity, and the laws of the land, intemperance and liquor drinking are on the increase in England; and, what is worst of all, Christian families, professedly, church members, and even ministers, are engaged in this. Only this week I was talking with an Englishman who had just arrived from England, who had been for twenty-five years clerk to a minister; and hence had a good opportunity to know what the ministers were doing. Being a member of that church, he of course did not make the thing worse than it was. He says it is no uncommon thing to see ministers drunk, and that he hardly knows one in whose piety he has any confidence. The following from the Christian Union Aug. 28, 1872, contains some startling figures:—

TEMPERANCE MEETINGS IN LONDON.

“There have been two great temperance meetings in London. One, of the Wesleyan Methodists in Mr. Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, which he offered to the conference for the occasion. In this meeting, rousing addresses were made to a crowded assembly. The chairman, Mr. N. B. Dowling, gave the following astonishing statistics, as to the sale and use of spirituous liquors in England:—

“‘In a report furnished to Mr. Bass by professor Levi, he found the following figures: Invested in the liquor traffic, in the production, &c., of intoxicating drinks, £117,100,000 sterling ($585,500,000); 1,500,000 persons employed in, and dependent upon, the trade; duty paid to government, £24,820,623. That was the statement. If other great branches of industry were compared with the liquor traffic, the following would be the result—invested in the liquor traffic £117,100,000, invested in the cotton trade £85,500,000, invested in the woolen manufacture £20,290,000, and in iron only £25,500,000. The dimensions of the liquor traffic were colossal, and its influence for good or evil must be proportionately large. Was it an influence for good? (Cries of “No.”) No, no; a thousand times, no.’

“‘In reply to those who called it an industry, he said: “‘An industry? It might be a trade or a traffic, but not an industry in the highest sense of the word. Important in its power, wealth, influence, capacity, but not important in value. Its product was poison; its certain results colossal fortunes to a few; misery, ruin, sin, degradation, woe, destitution, to the multitude. It paid to the government its £25,000,000 a year, but that £25,000,000 represented national industry stopped, national prosperity sapped, national resources wasted. Hence they said, No; a thousand times no; it was not an influence for good. (Cheers.) These figures represent a great fact which the Christian church and the nation must speedily lay to heart. They represented

accumulating prison and poor rates, lunatic asylum rates, women houseless, blasted reputation, ruined homes, destroyed virtue, commercial disasters, and the loss, too often, of commercial integrity. If they doubted his statements, he would summon before them the hundred thousand paupers, occupying our workhouses last year, eighty per cent. of whom found their way there through drink.’”

“From these extracts, the spirit of the meeting can be inferred. The general drift and final issue of the meeting was to confirm the doctrine of total abstinence, as the true and radical remedy.

“The other temperance meeting was held in the Crystal Palace, at the fete of the National Temperance League, and was composed of representatives of almost every county in the kingdom. It is stated that upwards of 62,000 persons were present. Rev. Theodore Cuyler addressed them as ‘two acres of Englishmen,’ all pledged to the doctrine of total abstinence. He appealed to the working people, as ‘forty leagues ahead of the aristocracy on this matter.’ He said, ‘the shame of England is this, that right in the face of nineteen centuries of civilization and Christianity looms up this horrid and unendurable monster, alcohol.’ ‘Ah! that is a horrible sight I have seen; four-fifths of all the tables at which I have been treated with old-fashioned British hospitality, have been darkened and, in my honest judgment, cursed by the wine decanter.’ He called on them to meet and agitate till total abstinence should be the law of Christian society, and regulate the laws of the State.”

THE SPREAD OF INFIDELITY.

While ministers are boasting of the conquest of the church, and assuring their readers that the world is fast being converted, and that the millennium is at hand, every fact in the case shows that the world is rapidly drifting into skepticism and infidelity; nay, even worse, even into atheism. Listen to the following from Mr. Beecher:—

“LEAVING GOD OUT.”

“One of the most significant traits of a good deal of the speculative thought of our day is its endeavor to get along without God. Elaborate schemes of life and knowledge are presented on every side, of which the characteristic feature, and it would almost seem the transcendent recommendation also, is that they are schemes which dispense with God. There seems in many of them an impatience of the very idea of a present supernatural element in affairs. Any attempt to recognize a moral intent in nature, or signs of an actual spiritual government in the world, is declared to be idle. Origins and purposes are forbidden problems. God is a being or a name with which philosophy and science have nothing to do. Their province is to catalogue and compare the facts and sequences of the physical and intellectual worlds. Divine intents, spiritual uses, ultimate moral designs, are resultless questions and may better be forgotten.”

“That this is the position taken by many leaders of modern thought, requires no proof. The view is a popular one, and advocated by not a few.”

These are terrible facts. And here is another one from church and State to the same point. It shows that even ministers are drifting in the same direction. God is being left out in almost everything.

“We have been reading the commencement notices, and at a few of the graduating exercises we have been present; we have read a great many alumni and society addresses, and the question that continually rises in our mind is, Is this a Christian country? are these Christian institutions? Is there any such thing as Christian manhood? If so, why is it never recognized? Graduates, alumni, ministers, and all, seem to shun religious topics as they would a pestilence. We heard one prayer before a graduating class, in which the only thing which seemed needful to the minister was muscle. He prayed for muscle again and again; he gesticulated as if to prove that so far as he was concerned, the prayer was answered; of Christian character, Christian faith, Christian breadth and purpose, we did not hear a word. . . . We are by no means intolerant of Mr. Darwin and Herbert Spencer, on such occasions; but cannot we be spared one little corner for Christianity? Of all the thousand graduates and hundred alumni speakers, is there not one who is willing to stand forth and say a word in defense of Christian faith and manhood, things which should lie at the foundation of every noble character? We do not ask these young men and women to imitate a speaker in a prayer meeting, telling his experience. We do not wish what is usually called ‘a pious speech,’ but we do wish an honest and manly recognition of the services of Christianity, of the new and noble type of character it has given to its work of its elevating influences, of its marvelous adaptation to the needs of human nature. We wish to have evidence that the rising generation are neither superstitiously and unthinkingly to accept the revelation of Christianity, nor superficially to ignore it, but that they are to welcome, examine, and test it with intellect and heart, as they do revelations in science and art, so that whether they accept or reject it, they may do it with intelligence.” D. M. CANRIGHT.