The True Outlook

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, Cal., Kansas City, and New York · Nov 29, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, Nos. 48, 49.

THE only true outlook of worldly things is from the watch-tower of God. He who looks from any of the towers erected by human wisdom sees but in part. His vision is absorbed in strong lights or deep shadows, and he loses even the outline of the important. The nearer objects of vision, oftentimes small and insignificant, obscure the great and essential. The near-by-way seems larger than the more distant traveled road. The little, sluggish, artificial canal seems more than the mighty stream of time on which empires are drifting to destruction. A mere partisan measure of to-day hides the eternal moral principle. A name of some exalted human hero shuts from our view the great God and our duty to Him. "We see dimly in the present what is small and what is great." The temporal, worldly view is always a present view; it is the view of the sensuous, the covetous; it is the view of the brute. But the outlook from the watch-tower of God takes in time past, present, and future. The observer sees the great Stadium of Time, and the nations passing in review before him. Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Judah, Persia, Greece, Rome, are fallen. The divided nations of earth are struggling for contest, for enlargement, for power, wealth, and glory. Just on before lie the tremendous issues of the judgment of God and the coming of the King of kings, in whose presence nations and kingdoms shrivel and perish. In human view Might often makes Right; de facto is de jure; but in God's plan and outlook there is one eternal standard of Right; and the end demonstrates that it is eternal Might. O friend, turn thee to the true light, the "more sure word of prophecy"!