MINORITIES by E. P. Marvin

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 9, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 35.

MINORITIES.

By E. P. Marvin

"THESE miserable minorities!" Such remarks as the above are never made by thoughtful and good people. Minorities are generally in the right, especially at first on all great moral questions, and majorities are in the wrong. There is generally more of brains and conscience in the few than in the many.

"Vox populi vox Dei" is a pagan and a Pelagian lie. It would be nearer the truth if written "Vox populi vox Diaboli."

Read Bible history. The voice of the majority defied God's judgment flood, demanded a king, contrary to the will of God, and even clamored for the crucifixion of the Son of God!

Every evil wrong has been sanctioned by the voice of the people, and every good and right thing condemned. Minorities have had to stand and suffer for truth and righteousness all along the ages, and so it will be until the end.

Was the voice of the French atheistic mob that cried, "We must have no monarch in heaven if we would have none on earth," the voice of God?

Is the popular voice that annually sanctions gigantic evils like the rum traffic, the voice of God?

No, no; let no cowardly poltroon despise minorities, and flatter himself that he is always or usually on the Lord's side with the selfish and thoughtless majority.

Young men, you can do nothing nobler than to espouse some unpopular and righteous cause, and give your lips to it with a heroic minority. Earth's minorities make heaven's majorities.

"What is a minority? The chosen heroes of the earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy to-day that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have vindicated humanity in every struggle. It is the minority that have stood in the van of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.

"You will find that each generation has been always busy in gathering up the scattered ashes of the martyred heroes of the past to deposit them in the golden urn of a nation's history.

"Minority! if a man stand up for the right, though the right be on the scaffold, while the wrong sit in the seat of government; if he stand for the right, though he eat with the right and truth a wretched crust; if he walk with obloquy and scorn in the by-lanes and streets, while the falsehood and wrong ruffle it in silken attire, let him remember that whatever the right and truth are, there are always troops of beautiful, tall angels gathered around him, and God himself stands within the dim future, and keeps watch over his own.

"If a man stands for the right and truth, though every man's finger be pointed at him, though every woman's lips be curled at him in scorn, he stands in a majority; for God and good angels are with him, and greater are they that are for him, than all they that be against him."—E. P. Marvin.