Beginning Life | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 17, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 27.

Beginning Life.

CONVERSION is the beginning, under inspiration’s teaching, of the voluntary reconstruction of one’s life. It is the beginning of the work of rebuilding character and conduct, on the basis of love. It is the beginning. It is no more than the beginning. Of course all the morality counts. All that he has received from the morality of reflex Christianity; all that comes down to him through the hereditary influences of his foregoers, parents, and ancestors—all that counts; that is to say, he begins on a higher level, higher and higher. But in every individual instance the love of God is the supreme motive of life; the love of our fellowmen, that is the foundation, and a man that has been living on any other foundation than that, when he is converted, comes back to that as the rule and law of his life. He is a beginner, or, as newspapers often say, “a new beginner,” as if there could be an old beginner; as if beginning was not new always.—Sel.