AN editorial in the San Jose Mercury not long ago, touched the real point of reform when it declared: “The great need is moral training. We used to get it in the home and in the school and the church, but they seem all to have gone into the business of making money, and have no time to bother with such trifles as moral characters; and the results are not pleasant to contemplate. With all the improved conditions, the human goods we are turning out are not up to the mark of a half-century ago, physically, or intellectually, or spiritually, or morally.”
It declares “that what the world needs to-day is not laws, nor courts, nor technical education,” so much as “the one product which the church alone can furnish, when it is onto its job,—men of moral backbone, who can stand on their own feet as Jesus did, when tempted, and say, and mean it, too, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ Make it easy to do right, and men will not do it, just because it is easy; but make a man want to do right, and nothing can hold him back from the doing of it.” “Build laws of laws” about evil men, and “they will grin at you over them. In proportion as the hearts of men are right, do they need less laws. The only cure for outside dishonesty is truth in the inward parts.”
And this is true. But what can you do when the church has lost its standard—the Ten Commandments, the moral law of God—and has lost its remedy—the creative power of God in the gospel of Jesus Christ? Not until these things are restored in the church by the consent and faith-grasp of the church itself, can we hope for creations of moral character among men.
