Editorial Notes by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 16, 1901

Editorial Notes.

By Editor

DON'T try to frighten the devil by telling what you are going to do. All he cares about is what you are doing.

SOME people are so short of time in this world that they are going to be short of eternity in the next.

IN every sin you agree to an eternal separation from everything that is good. You bid an eternal farewell to all those you love.

SOME professedly Christian people seem to count it much less a sacrifice to throw money away on some useless indulgence than to invest it in the bank of heaven.

DON'T run after a lie about yourself; it can outrun you every time. It is your daily life that tells what you are; and if that is right, you need not worry about what any one says to the contrary.

WHEN you would excuse yourself from the performance of religious duty, stop and picture in your mind how that excuse will sound at the bar of God. Remember that it must pass muster with Him, as well as with yourself.

It is impossible to put a stop to evil in this world by legislation. Laws are the levees along the banks of the stream of evil, to confine it within bounds; and every time men try to dam up the stream, the result is disastrous. The only remedy is the gospel, which dries up the stream at its fountain head.

A RECENT injunction issued by a Milwaukee judge to the Vilter manufacturing company of that city against the International Association of Machinists, which is now conducting a strike throughout the country, enjoins the strikers “from gathering about the plant, from posting pickets, from combining with the tradesmen in order to boycott the Vilter company,” and from doing anything else that would “in any way operate to damage the Vilter company or its employees.” And just the other day two courts in Chicago gave decisions declaring that “blacklisting,” by which corporations boycott individual workers against whom one of them has a grievance, is perfectly legal. So we have the courts of this country declaring that it is illegal for workmen to boycott a company, but legal for a company to boycott workmen. Such an attitude of the courts will certainly not be without results, and when times are less prosperous, if not before, the results will be clearly seen.

As they investigate more, geologists are getting less certain about those tremendous eons of time which we have all heard must have elapsed since life began on the earth. Writing in the Sunday School Times, Prof. G. Frederick Wright, author of “The Ice Age in North America,” and “Man and the Glacial Period,” says:—

“It seems now certain that geological time is much shorter than it was once supposed to be. Instead of the hundreds of millions of years which used to be flung in here and there by the geologists as ‘mere trifles’ in geological time, the geologists are now struggling hard to retain possession of as much as one hundred million years for the entire development of organic life in the world; while it is strenuously maintained by the highest authorities, both in physics and geology, that twenty-five million is all that can be allowed them. This shortening of the age of the earth compels us to face the fact that many geological changes have been relatively rapid, and that some of the greatest of these are of very recent occurrence.”

Keep on; geological friends; you are doing well. From one hundred million years down to twenty-five million years is a long step in the right direction. Another step only about a third of this length will put you into full harmony with the Bible.