TRANSFORMATION by Dean Farrar

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 1, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 48.

TRANSFORMATION

By Dean Farrar

If we make this world, as far as we are concerned, a world wherein dwelleth righteousness, so far do we anticipate the fruition of the new world, the New Jerusalem. Let us aim at this tranquil, this sober happiness of quiet and confidence, and peace in God. This is no chimera. The possibility of winning this is no illusion. In our patience let us possess, let us acquire, our souls. The world will still be the world. There will still be the pestilence which walketh in darkness, and the arrow that flieth in the noonday. The animalism of brutal passions will still crowd our streets with the infamy of its victims and the wretchedness which dogs their heels. There will still be envy, and hatred, and malice, and lies, and sickness, and poverty, and death; but the world in which our inmost souls shall live and move and have their being will even in this life become an anticipated fruition of the new heaven and the new earth. The outer world may still continue for many a long year . . . to grope in

Egyptian darkness, in darkness which may be felt; but our souls, like the children of Israel in Goshen, may have light in their dwellings. For God is light, and he who dwelleth in God dwelleth in light; and where God’s light is, there is wisdom and safety, and a peace which the world does not even attempt to give, and which, happily, neither its malice, nor its wickedness, nor its misfortunes, can ever take away.—Dean Farrar.