INTEGRITY NECESSARY

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, Cal. · Nov 21, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 45.

INTEGRITY NECESSARY.

ONE of the most important elements in right character-building is strict integrity, or wholeness, fulness of perfect outline. This must be the perfect purpose, the high aim, or all is eventually lost.

Integrity includes truth and righteousness in its wholeness. No man can possess integrity who is not true to his word, true to his highest conception of duty.

No man can possess integrity of character who is not righteous in conduct. His moral lines must be right lines. A right line is a straight line—the shortest distance between two points. Any change in that line makes it crooked, perverts it. Everything made to conform to it is affected thereby.

God, in His wisdom, carefully guarded His people in this respect. Right in the very beginning of their history He thus speaks: “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.” Deut. 4:2. And the last book of the Bible has among its closing words the following: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy

of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.” Rev. 22: 18, 19.

God would guard the integrity of His people by having them regard the integrity of His Word. If they would keep His commandments, they must keep all of them. Those precepts were the right lines of their moral conduct. To pervert them in the least is to pervert all character. It is equivalent to setting aside the commandments and substituting a law of one’s own. It is in moral life what it would be to an architect’s plan to measure with a rule too long or too short. Everything would be marred. It would be like a ship captain sailing with a perverted compass in cloudy weather over an uncharted sea.

The penalty of thus adding to or subtracting from God’s commandments is not an arbitrary inflection; it exists in the departure, the deviation, the change itself. As soon as man departs from right, he goes into wrong; and found in the wrong, he must suffer with wrong-doers.

This does not include the redeemed sinner who is ignorant of his sin. A man may be a transgressor of God’s law, yet accepted of God, because he is walking in all the light he has, and the purpose is accepted for the deed.

This does not include the man who sometimes fails and falls and sins, yet nevertheless shades not one hair the perfect standard of God. His condemnation is only of his sin. He has no excuse for it. “The law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.” God is not at fault. Such an one will ever come back to the true standard.

But the soul which begins to excuse his sin, in that very thing begins to lower or pervert the standard. And such a lowering of the standard of God is fatal to all true character-building, fatal to all true work of God. No soul can afford it. No institution of God can afford to lower God’s standard of right.