WORKING WITH GOD | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 8, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 41.

WORKING WITH GOD.

[The late Dr. Cyrus A. Bartol, in The Watchman.]

How we run neck and neck and get overstrained! Neuralgia, paralysis, and consumption await selfish aspirants who burn the midnight oil when they should be asleep. They die at forty or fifty and we say they have been working too hard! Indeed they have, hindering God's work in and through them, and never opening that humility which is His only door.

Delicious awe before the Highest is worth all the discoveries of cotton gin, mill turbine, patent reaper, and field fertilizer, purely as an economic force. The Romans reared massive aqueducts, filling valleys and crowning hills, not understanding the law by which a flood would run with all inequalities of level through a little pipe. All we want for a nobler efflux is that head of power in the heart which genuine ownership of Deity will supply, and which makes men as fresh and young at eighty as at twenty, with feeling virgin and untouched.

If, after the Latin motto, prudence is a great revenue, so is reverence. How men sweat and toil to beat in the arena or to distance in the race! But when I tie to that will which is a perpetual going forth, I feel like a skiff towed at a steamer's stern; for we can use up gravitation sooner than God. My neighbor got tired pumping water into the tank at his housetop, and he put a vane on his barn over the well so that it now furnishes kitchen, and table, and hose sprinkler, with a fountain in front of his lawn into the bargain, while from his siesta he looks on. Doubtless we must work as well as wait; but there is no work like subduing our own selfish will.