p. 4 | GOOD COUNSEL

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 18, 1897

GOOD COUNSEL.

We clip the following from the Noblesville (Indiana) Ledger. It contains common sense, and the latter part of it is good advice from a political view point:—

“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Matt. 4:4. “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” John 6:63. In the old book of the law we read these words: “And he said unto them, Set your hearts unto all the words which I testify among you this day, . . . because it is your life.” Deut. 32:46, 47. These scriptures settle forever the great question of life,—eternal life in the Word. That is, we have eternal life promised us through the Word by obedience. And when we have not his Word abiding in us, we are severed from the life of God, and are liable to do any wickedness.

Geikie in his Life of Christ, page 55, says: “That One who came not indeed to destroy the law and the prophets, but to free them from the perversions of rabbinical theology, should have been met by the bitterest hatred and a cruel death was only an illustration of the sad truth to which every age has borne witness, that ecclesiastical bodies who have the power to persecute, identify even the abuse of their system with the defense of religion, and are capable of any crime in their blind intolerance.”

And now, kind friends and good neighbors, let me appeal to you as the rulers of these United States of America. When you send your servant to the Legislature, and he should so far forget himself as to introduce a religious question into that assembly, as was done at the fifty-second Congress, call him home, put him to plowing or carrying the hod. It will do him good to work alongside of the poor toilers of earth for a time. Then before you send him back take him into your room and thoroughly instruct him. Tell him that our government is a civil and not a religious institution; then if he should say, “Why, our good minister brought this petition to us to make a Sunday law,” then tell your public servant, senator tho he may be, that he should be very kind to his old pastor, yet firm, and show him that he is out of his place; that the calling of a minister of Christ is a higher calling than even a senator, and that it is his glorious privilege to “preach the Word”—the Word of life—and thereby save souls from death; that these religious laws in colonial times burnt Spiritualists, whipped Baptists, and hanged Quakers; that religious liberty is the purchase of the Saviour’s blood and of millions of martyrs, and that Sunday laws are in a direct line with all the horrid persecutions of which history has furnished “an awful warning.”