Religion and Activity by Uriah Smith

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

Religion and Activity.

By Uriah Smith

A MAN can be religious without secluding himself from the world like the hermits of old, or shutting himself up in a monastery like the monks in the dark ages. There is no particular holiness in sloth and inactivity. Carry your religion into your business. Let it make you better in all the relations of life, and shed its hallowed light over all the paths you tread. That religion which has to be carefully guarded from contact with the outside world, and tenderly nursed in secrecy and seclusion, lacks the stamp of the genuine article. This is well illustrated by the following:

ANCIENT LEGEND.

“St. Anthony ‘lived a hermit in a wood, devoted to prayer and meditation; of which being proud, an angel appeared, bids him to go to such a town, and he should find a cobbler a far more holy man than he. Which he did, came and found the cobbler hard at his work, working and speaking sweetly of Christ, working and breathing out Heaven, such a tincture of glory upon his heart, so excellent in prayer and conference that he returned ashamed of himself, and ever after more low in his own eyes. He exercised more grace at his awl than St Anthony at his altar, and shamed his solitary pride with his poor honest trade.”—Morality of Fourth Commandment, pp. 37, 38.

U. S.