The Worth of Religion

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 26, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 21.

The Worth of Religion

If our religion is worth aught to us it ought to make us better. A religion that will not make a dishonest man honest and keep an honest man in the right way, is unworthy of preservation either as a present asset or as a relic of the past. The quicker we let it go and get the genuine in its place the better. It ought to make us not only morally honest, but intellectually honest; a distinction which is oftentimes made, but which in most instances is a distinction without a difference; and yet sometimes prejudice and early teaching lead men to be intellectually dishonest, or, putting it in the mildest form, inconsistent, who are morally honest. There is need that the moral power and spiritual discernment be applied not only to the matter of morals pure and simple, but to the intellectual exercises of the mind as well. Truth demands not simply holy living, but consistent, logical thinking. It was not a meaningless expression, not an expression which applied only in part to the Father and the Son, when Jesus declared that “I and My Father are one.” The oneness included not only the moral phase of unity but the intellectual phase and every other aspect, and He prays that His children may be one even as He and the Father are one. More than this, the apostle pleads with them that they may all speak the same thing that they be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.