NOT BY PROXY | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 3, 1893

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 19, No. 22.

NOT BY PROXY.

SHIRKS are mean. Tried by that canon, meanness is a prevalent vice. Religious laziness is one of the first fruits of the fall, and one of the last that regeneration cures. "Let Susan do it," says Jane in the kitchen. "Let George do it," says Tom in the barnyard. "Let the rich members do it," say the men of moderate means. "Let the deacons do it," say the low privates in the church. "Let the women do it," say all we laggard men when we want petitions circulated for reform. "Let the preacher do it," say a hundred laymen who are proud of their ability everywhere else but in the house of God. We are blossoming into committees and orders in the church. Rome will have to put on spurs to keep out of our way. There is room and work for them all. I wish we could have an order of deacons in the scriptural sense. But the fear is that many of us will try to serve the Lord by proxy. Our consciences are pliant in that direction. If there are special agents to do special work beyond our reach, let them do it; but the deaconesses and city missionaries can do no more than their own work. A thousand of them cannot do your duty, or mine, or that of the humblest member of our Christian communion. They cannot visit the poor, or relieve the distressed, or comfort the sorrowing, or minister to the sick, for me or you, in such a sense as to leave us to our idleness or our pleasures. No; the Book keeps personal account, and when it is opened in the great day, it will not contemplate the mass, but the man; not the order of deaconesses, but the individual woman in the order, the home, the shop, the street. To try the proxy plan is to starve our own souls, lose fellowship with Him who went about doing good, stagnate the spirit, and die of inanition. The responsibility is personal up to the measure of our opportunity.

"Somebody else will?" No; somebody else can't. Gabriel cannot do the duty of any man or woman of the race. An angel can do his work, not mine. We shall do well, in this time of multiplied and valuable agencies, to be severely watchful against the shirking temper of our poor humanity. "Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these" cannot be put aside by the plea that someone else did it. What a world we could make of this, by God's all-helpful grace, if all the professed friends of the pitying Helper were aflame with personal zeal! "All at it and always at it" carries a spirit which would set the world on fire. "What wilt thou have me to do?" was the cry that came from the pierced heart of Saul of Tarsus when that strange light shined the darkness out of his soul. And the voice from the supernal brightness—"dark with insufferable light"—hurled no accusation against high priest or Sanhedrin, but at the astonished messenger of religious rage: "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" Saul could not hide behind "authority." What wilt thou have us to do? is conventional, and brings no answer. What wilt thou have me to do? reaches the throne.—Selected.