FACTS AS THEY ARE by Editor

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 20, 1879

FACTS AS THEY ARE.

By Editor

The present age is vain-glorious and boastful. "Peace and safety," "progress and prosperity," are the song of many who fear not God, and regard not his commandments. And the Church has not entirely escaped this contamination, but sometimes boasts of her success when she should blush for her unfaithfulness, her lukewarmness, and her apostasy. Churches publish their statistics, count up their numbers, talk of their missions and their converts, and while only one side of the question is considered, the exhibit seems very encouraging; but while all this may do for platform speeches, and may serve to stimulate the benefactions of the unthinking, there are other grave facts, known to all who wish to know them, which necessarily modify the conclusions of thinking men. The Missionary Advocate calls attention to some important aspects of the case as follows:---

"We spend in the United States $700,000,000 for intoxicating drinks yearly. All the boards of missions spend for the salvation of the world something under $6,000,000. There is the solemn secret. More than a hundred dollars used to send men to hell, for every dollar to send them the gospel of life! Yet this is a Christian country. We boast our civilization, our culture, our institutions; we think we are doing very well, and deserve the admiration of the world: yet our bureaus of statistics disclose awful facts to our disgrace. We have no excuse for these things. They are wrong. The Gospel can remedy them if we will do our duty. A day is coming when God will arise, and terribly shake the earth. Give us as much money for missions as is used in the cancerous traffic of liquor, and we will solve the problem of the reign of evil forever."

If a "Christian country" spends a hundred times as much money to destroy men as it spends to save them; if the rum bill of a nation—to say nothing of the tobacco abomination—is a hundred times as large as the missionary expenditure, how long will it take such "Christian nations" to Christianize the world?

It is not well to delude ourselves with false hopes or mislead ourselves by partial statements of the facts around us. Any man who dares to look the actual condition of the world in the face; to descend to the dark and terrible facts and statistics of crime and guilt and vileness which are all around us, will very soon see that with all the material facilities of the present age, and with all the vast wealth of professing Christians, the Church to-day is putting forth no adequate efforts to stem the tide of evil which rolls through the land.

We would not undervalue the work of missions or missionaries. We are not insensible to the glorious triumphs of the Gospel of Christ, nor are we ignorant of the power of divine grace and saving truth; but we remember also that the great Captain of our salvation fought on this same battle field, and was outnumbered, crucified, and slain. The true Church is yet, in comparison with the world, but "a little flock."

We remember hearing the venerable Dr. Lyman Beecher say, in a ministerial conference in Plymouth, Massachusetts: "It would take to all eternity to convert the world, at the rate that modern revivals progress." And we confess that we do not see evidence that "modern revivals" are becoming very much more effective.

It is comparatively easy for men who confine themselves to the charmed circle of their own associates, and who in their snug and comfortable quarters enjoy all the good things of this life, to imagine that the world is growing better, and that the dawn of millennial peace is at hand; but those who, forsaking all for Christ, go forth to labor in the vineyard of the Lord, see little to warrant such hopes. Those with whom Christianity is a fact, and who toil with restless and incessant zeal; who see how hard it is to convert men from the error of their ways, and how easy it is for a formal church to slide down into coldness and indifference; are led to cry with the prophets of old: "Lord who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?"

We would not breathe one syllable to discourage the zeal or restrain the efforts of those who seek to spread the knowledge of the Lord in all the earth, but we believe it to be of vast importance that the message which is carried to them who dwell in the dark corners of the earth, shall be the truth of God, rather than the fancies of a vain-glorious and light minded age. The awful facts of human iniquity, of man's utter ruin, of his rebellion against his Maker, and the impending doom which awaits a world that "lieth in the wicked one," need to be prominently and persistently set forth, as a background to that "light of the knowledge of the glory of God" which shines to lighten those that sit in the darkness and in the shadow of death.

It is time to have done with dreaming, and to comprehend the actual debasement of man as an individual and as a race, and then we shall be prepared to set forth Christ as the only Redeemer, not only from individual sin, but from the iniquities that burden a cursed and groaning creation. He who bore our sins in his own body on the tree, is "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." And while we sing of his love and grace, we may also "sing of mercy and judgment;" for "the wrath of the Lamb" is as certain and as terrible, as his long-suffering has been constant and compassionate.—The Christian.