Men’s Need of God

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 27, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 43.

Men’s Need of God.

The New York Observer in its comments on Sunday-school lessons rightly remarks:—

“No nation can live in history without a God. The experiment has been tried again and again, and always with complete failure. Popular government can not successfully be carried on out of sight of Sinai and out of harmony with the two tables of the law. No sadder historic illustration of this fact is afforded than by the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. The Ten Tribes tried to get on without the Ten Commandments. They could not. No nation can. God must be taken into account if prosperity, either private or public, is the result.”

But Israel did not mean to utterly reject God. They professed Him still. They only substituted in a way the heathenism for some parts of the Ten Commandments. And that is just what the people of this nation are doing to-day whenever they enact or indorse Sunday laws; for Sunday laws are man’s substitution for God’s eternal precept, declaring that the seventh day, not the first, “is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.” Substitution to-day is as bad as substitution in the days of the Jeroboams or Ahab.