p. 7 | The One Remedy

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 9, 1901

The One Remedy.

There are many evils in the world. Great intemperance, licentiousness, brutality, are manifest in the most horrible of crimes. These vices roll in like overwhelming floods. They threaten soon to overwhelm the earth. Good men’s souls are stirred to their very depths because of it. But the remedy nearly always proposed is law, prohibitory law, regulating this, that, and the other thing; divorce laws, labor laws, laws against every sort of evil, are clamored for and passed; but the evil rolls on in still huger waves. Law is not the remedy. It may protect the weak, the innocent, the defenseless; that is its purpose; but law can not effect reform. For the seat of all this evil is in the low, lustful, fleshly heart of man. “For from within, out of the heart,” says the wisdom of God, “proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within.” It therefore follows that the only way to reform the man, and hence society, is to change the heart, to regenerate it, to make it new. Only the creative power of God can do this. Only the salvation of the Gospel can accomplish it. All the ink and paper in the world, if converted into laws, will not change a single heart. But that heart yielded to Jesus Christ may be changed “immediately,” even as the leper was cleansed, by His word. Soul, that is your remedy.