DO CHRISTIANS MEAN BUSINESS?
We sometimes hear of instances of wonderful generosity, of persons giving by tens of thousands of dollars to the work of God under earnest exhortations and passionate appeals. And yet, measured by the divine rule, some poor widow may have cast in more than they all. What are ten or twenty thousand dollars? There are hundreds of men who have for years given their whole lives to the work of God, with a devotion and diligence which might have made them millionaires had they lived for self and the world. They have no thousands to give, they may not have a dollar in the world, but they have given all, long ago,—not under exciting appeals, but in hours of lonely consecration to God,—and no one puts items in the newspapers about their great generosity; but the Lord has it all recorded in His book. Sometimes we hear how Christians have given their jewels, their diamond pins, their gold rings, under the wave of a mighty enthusiasm for the cause of God; but no one remembers those who with equal opportunities for adornment have no rings or pearls or diamonds to give, because they have already given the time and the money such things would cost to save lost men from sin and death. And what have Christians to do with such gaudy trumpery anyway? Have they not been wearing it in direct and open disobedience to the word of God? Have they not been wasting the Lord’s money in defiance of His revealed will, in buying a lot of trash that will not bring half price when it is sold for old junk? Surely, if such manifestations measure the high-water mark of Christian giving, we may well say, “Where is boasting then? It is excluded.” Talk of a hundred thousand dollars given in a day, as a matter of boasting and gratulation; why, the priest in charge of the shrine of the horrible Hindu idol, at Calcutta, being asked not long ago what was the amount of the offerings presented by her worshippers the previous day, named in reply a sum equal to three hundred thousand pounds sterling, or nearly a million and a half of dollars. “Yet,” says the Christian (London), “the mighty and wealthy Christian nation which rules India, while spending one hundred and twenty million pounds sterling a year in drink, can spare only one million pounds per annum for the spread of the gospel.” There are multitudes of heathen shrines and temples in India, where offerings are made and paid; but it seems that the Hindu worshippers at a single temple have in one day given nearly one third as much as is collected in all the churches and societies in Great Britain for the foreign field in a whole year. Yet Christians profess to have light and truth and the gospel of Christ, and they pity the benighted heathen who lack all these things. In rejoicing in the light, they do well; but in devotion and self-sacrificing zeal in the service of God, they might well imitate these benighted heathen, and profit by their example.