What the World Needs by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Feb 18, 1913

What the World Needs

By Editor

THE following is from a secular paper, the Wall Street Journal, but it is a needed sermon for all that:

"What America needs more than railway extension, and Western irrigation, and a low tariff, and a bigger wheat crop, and a merchant marine, and a new navy, is a revival of piety, the kind mother and father used to have—piety that counted it good business to stop for daily family prayer before breakfast, right in the middle of harvest; that quit field work a half hour earlier Thursday night, so as to get the chores done and go to prayer-meeting; that borrowed money to pay the preacher's salary, and prayed fervently in secret for the salvation of the rich man who looked with scorn on such unbusinesslike behavior.

"That's what we need now to clean this country of the filth of graft, and of greed, petty and big; of worship of fine houses and big lands and high office and grand social functions. What is this thing we are worshiping but a vain repetition of what decayed nations fell down and worshiped just before their light went out? Read the history of Rome in decay, and you'll find luxury there that could lay a big dollar over our little doughnut that looks so large to us. Great wealth never made a nation substantial nor honorable. There is nothing on earth that looks good that is so dangerous for a man or a nation to handle as quick, easy, big money. If you do resist its deadly influence the chances are that it will get your son. *It takes greater and finer heroism to dare to be poor in America than to charge an earthworks in Manchuria."