What the World Pays

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Aug 26, 1875

What the World Pays.

Sometimes men of the world complain that the church is wasting money in various benevolent causes, without much profit. The old question, asked eighteen hundred years ago, "Why is this waste?" is often asked in our times. Men want to know why so much is expended in foreign missions; why so much is given to plant the gospel in pagan lands, and they tell us we are squandering the money we thus use.

But such persons forget how much is being expended in lust and sin, in folly and extravagance.

What do intoxicating drinks cost the people of this country? The figures are absolutely startling. And these immense amounts are given not for any good, but to impoverish society, to debauch the community, and ruin souls. The men who think it unwise to pay money to send the gospel to the heathen; who are blind to all the glorious changes which have been wrought in the pagan world, do not seem to notice what vast sums are paid to make drunkards, to fill our prisons, to ruin our young men, and swell the mighty army of widows and orphans.

How much is paid in this country for tobacco? The vile and filthy weed is smoked, chewed, snuffed and used in a dozen disgusting ways to the damage of brain, lungs, heart and stomach. And how much men pay for this useless, loathsome narcotic. Men who condemn missions don't think of the cost of tobacco. They pay for that, not thinking that it costs more for the vile weed than for missions.

Then how much is paid for light literature? Men who cannot—or who say they cannot—afford a religious paper for their family use, will spend on the story papers, and the meanest of the daily papers, ten times as much as a religious paper would cost them. They do not say they cannot afford these worthless papers, but buy them every day. But they are so poor they cannot afford to take a religious paper for their children.

It requires more than two thousand five hundred men and women to run the theaters of London. This outnumbers all the foreign missionaries on the earth. That one city alone has more ministers of vanity and sin, acting every night, than we have missionaries among the heathen to execute the great commission. And yet who complains of that waste? How bigoted we are called when we protest against theaters as useless expenditures.

When will Christians learn to be as liberal in the cause of Christ, as free with their money as rum-drinkers, tobacco-chewers, and theater-goers are with their money. When will we learn to do as much for Christ as men of the world do for their poor, polluted pleasures.—Christian Era.