Judging Man by God

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 4, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 49.

Judging Man by God

THE great question, after all, is this: Shall we judge man by God, or God by man? Do light and understanding flow upward or downward? If we judge man by God, at once we have true and discriminating thoughts of human life. We have absolute standards. We have a test of the worth of all we see or do. But if we judge God by man, we only have over again what the world has been so full of—the persuasions of self-interest, the disbelief in absolute righteousness, the changing standards of the changing times. Men have gone into the sanctuary of their own selfishness, the sanctuary of themselves, and straightway they have seemed to see an end of God. All sense of a supreme and awful Fatherhood on which all men depend, to which all action must go back for judgment, has been lost. No higher power than the human has seemed to be moving under and giving meaning to the events of ordinary life.—Phillips Brooks.