HEALTHY RELIGION by Franklin Edson Belden

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 24, 1901

HEALTHY RELIGION.

By Franklin Edson Belden

F. E. BELDEN. (Battle Creek, Mich.)

To say that a thing is religious, is not saying much. To say that it is Christian, is saying all that is good, in a word.

But what is Christianity?—It is the control of self. Churchanity is an attempt to domineer others. To the same extent that men rule others instead of themselves, does the papacy or anti-christ rule instead of Christ. Every religious organization on earth has more or less of this domineering “Beast” spirit—has it in exact proportion to the amount of human nature brought into church work. None of it enters Christian work. It is uncontrollable except by divine power, bestowed on conditions. Yielding the outer life to the rules of the Church does not supply the power, even among Seventh-day Adventists, notwithstanding the correctness of their doctrinal theories. Yielding the inner life to God, daily, hourly, “moment by moment,” is the only possible way of thinning the ranks of the papacy, Protestant or Roman Catholic.

Many a Protestant home has a papal husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, or other person, “running things,” or trying to do so. Nearly all business “managers” become papalistic, as well as church managers. The friction of resistance or competitive effort to rule, is the cause of the numberless occasions of “unpleasantness” in the various relations of life, social, religious, political, or mercantile. Christianity—the control of self—is all that is needed to make all things run smoothly. But this will never be general; so Christians must suffer as did the Master, “resisting not evil.”

It is much easier to manage others than to manage self; to stop work on the Sabbath than to stop overeating or wrong thinking on that day; to talk about the second coming of Christ than to perfect “holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” Hence publications which deal with these vital self-governing principles are religious,— Christian religious, though not always sectarian religious. The most intensely religious—Christian religious—thing a man can do is to control his appetites and passions, or rather, fully to consent to let God do this for him, not forgetting his own part of the work. It is as great an error to suppose that God does this without our co-operation as to teach that we can do it independently of Him. This is why so much has been said relative to the importance of health principles and of the books which contain them. Call them “health” publications, if you please; but do not for a moment forget that, dealing with the essence of Christian life, they are therefore in fact the strongest kind of religious books, teaching the continual, Daniel-like recognition of the fact that we are “not our own,” but “temples” of the Holy Spirit, the divine essence of purity. Discarding this truth of God, His Spirit is discarded also.

“If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine,” means the entire yielding of body, soul, spirit, to God, as the thing of first importance. One who thus consecrates all, shall know all that he needs to know about lesser doctrines. But fill him with other perfect theories first, and the chances are that he will think himself “rich, and increased with goods,” having “need of nothing,” when in fact he is “poor, and blind, and naked,” needing the “gold” of character “tried in the fire.”

Heaven will be full of people whose theology when on earth was wrong in many points, but whose lives were right. “Outer darkness” will be full of people whose theology was well-nigh perfect, but whose characters were worthless. Thousands to-day, outside of the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, are living examples of victory over “the world, the flesh, and the devil;” yet they keep strictly the counterfeit first-day sabbath. Their characters being well-nigh perfect, God will do “a quick work” in the earth when these consecrated ones “shall know of the doctrine” concerning the true Sabbath test for this generation. But it takes longer to develop a good character; and while many of us sleep, satisfied with clean theoretical lamps, without oil, the Bridegroom will come. “And while they went to buy, the Bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.” It did not take long to trim the lamps of doctrine. All did that, in the parable; but the time required to fill them caused the eternal loss of heaven to those who had not the graces of the Spirit.

God’s premium is on character, which is made of habits made of actions made of feelings made of foods, physical and mental, related to exercise, air, rest, cleanliness, etc. In other words, the “flesh” (ours) is about all we are able to control, even with divine power. Doing this, the Lord controls the devil, who controls the world, which, in the Church and outside of it, calls such consecration and sanctification of “body, soul, and spirit,” “crankiness.”

The true relation of habits to character, actions to habits, feelings to actions, food and exercise to feelings, is not understood by many. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” says the Lord. Does that mean knowledge of theories of truth concerning the Sabbath, conditional immortality, the sanctuary and the judgment, the prophecies, and religious liberty,—to believe and advocate these things? or does it mean knowledge of how to co-operate through these channels with divine power, for which power many of us have prayed for years, seemingly ignorant of the fact that it is not all stored up in heaven, but that some of it is inseparably bound up in the right use of His temporal gifts and our physical and mental endowments?

Medical science (not “falsely so called”) is simply the discovery of truth in nature, God’s other book. One says, “Thou shalt not;” the other says, “For these reasons.” One says, “Know thyself;” the other says, “I discover a cause of my feelings.” One says, “Blessed are the pure in heart;” the other says, “Such is the ordained effect of these things on the mind, the throne of reason.”

Knowledge fortifies; ignorance endangers the best of purposes. The law of heredity in our members is much weakened in its “warring” against the divine law in our minds, by our living in harmony with the divine laws of physiological cause and effect.

In this age of special God-given light on these points, they who “thank God through our Lord Jesus Christ” for the victory over inherited and

cultivated tendencies, must accept the flesh-crucifying truth that His life is in certain food elements and habits, and that the life of the enemy of all righteousness—gluttony, impatience, lust—is in certain other modern dietetic and so-called social inventions. He is honored as much by thanks for scientific knowledge, of which He is the author, and by the use of which we co-operate with Him in the warfare against sin, as by gratitude in other cases for seemingly more miraculous deliverance from death. One method of helping is as divine as the other. Lazy and sensual people want the Lord to do it all for them, if done at all—which they seem to regret is necessary. They cry out against human works as of no avail, and indeed they are not, without first yielding the will to Him, in which case He works in us “to do of His good pleasure,” and we then “work out” our salvation with fear and trembling. Having worked knowledge into us, must He also work it out for us without effort on our part? Let us remember that true faith “works by love and purifies the heart.”

Faith is active, not passive. He who does nothing has no true faith. If knowledge were not to be used by us, God would not have given it, but would have taken all evil tendencies out of the flesh. Not so. Christ said, “The flesh is weak,” even when “the spirit is willing.” Co-operation with God for the control of self, for the good of others, is therefore essential. This is healthy religion—Christianity.