p. 3 | WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 29, 1876

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?

We are inclined to think that the American pulpit is lacking in this, that it has not laid down to the people with sufficient emphasis the true definitions of wealth, it has not put the divine limitations upon the use and ownership of means, it has not sufficiently defined the rights of property, and of those who have not property. Our impression is that we ministers have preached the religion of forgiveness too much and the religion of righteousness too little. We have an idea that we need to have a religion of the day of Judgment, a little more than we have. We have an idea we have preached forgiveness of sin in such a way as to make it so easy that men have accommodated their lives to the doctrine; they have gone on and sinned and sinned, and we have even fortified them in their sin by telling them they could be forgiven any time they wanted to be; that all they had to do was to go down on their knees and pray for it. How does it strike you, reader?

If this is true, brethren, then it is time for us ministers to turn the wheel about and head the ship in another direction. If men have got the idea that there is exhaustless mercy in Heaven, with so little care in its outgoings that a man can pray to-day and sin to-morrow, and be as good as if he had not sinned, by another prayer, then we had better preach something else. If there has gotten into our prayer-meetings a habit of gush, a perverted sentiment, what you may call sentimentalism, so that religion is conceived of by our young people as simply “coming to Jesus” rather than doing downright righteousness, rather than being honest in trade and regardful of others’ rights, then we had better change our preaching. And our prayer-meeting folks had better change their manner of praying and exhorting; for we know that religion, when you analyze it down to the last analysis, has but one crystal drop, and you can see clear through that drop, and it spells out this, “obey.”

Let our pulpits henceforth insist that God must be obeyed. If the people wish to know what religion is they should be told that religion is obeying God. Not God up in Heaven somewhere, as you vainly picture him, but God written in human statutes, so far as they are just; God written in human legislation so far as it is wise; God written organically in the fibers of your stomach and the muscles of your legs and arms; God written in the beauty of the world, in the voice of human rights, in the progress of man as truly as in the pages of the Bible. This great universal God, whose great law of righteousness is written everywhere and in everything, must be obeyed; and when man has obeyed, then he has become one with him.—Golden Rule.