The Ark of Safety

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Apr 17, 1879

The Ark of Safety.

Dr. D. E. Maxson has a sermon in the Sabbath Recorder of April 3, which closes with the following forcible words:

“Men and brethren, fathers and mothers, the storm is gathering, that will sweep with fiery surges on, on through the vast eternities. Are you in the ark? Are your children all in the ark? “Come thou, and all thy house into the ark.” Parents, are you going to leave any one of your children out in the storm to drift onto the rocks? God has set you as light-houses on the reefs along the dangerous shores. Are your lights burning as brightly as they ought out in the darkness, so that your sons and your daughters can see them so clearly as to be certain where the dangerous places are? Are your lives so much above the world, and its dangerous rocks and alluring currents, that your children will not have to rise up in judgment against you? or are you in the current with them, drifting, drifting on towards the rocks and the ruin? Have you, parents, a bright light up over the rock of Sabbath-breaking? Oh, it is a dangerous rock. Only the ark of God can ride safely by it. Are you, and all your family safe in that ark? Are your man-servants and maid-servants, your cattle, and the stranger that is within your gates, all in? For all these, you, parents, are responsible. Have you, fathers, mothers, bright lights out over the dreadful Charybdis of intemperance, down whose awful maelstrom so many are being drawn by our licensed rum-shops and unlicensed grogeries? Do you, men and women of God, realize into what a dense fog of gathering iniquity your light must shine, if our beautiful city be saved from becoming a very Sodom, under the rule of rum into which its citizens have recently voted it? On a stormy coast a father kept a light-house; his son had been away on the sea three years. It was a dark

night, the storm was howling on the sea, the keeper fell asleep, and let the light go out. The morning came, and the fragments of a wrecked vessel were drifting up along the beach; dead bodies too came up. The frightened watchman went down from the watch-tower to gather up the dead seamen, and the first he found was his own son, so near home, but lost by his father’s negligence. Fathers, mothers, don’t let your lights go out. Your children may perish in the darkness. More than your minister, more than your Sabbath-school superintendent and teacher, are you responsible for the salvation of your children. God has made it so in the fundamental constitution of society. Come into the ark, thou and all thy household. The storm is coming. Sooner than you think the winds will be blowing, the waves will be beating. Come into Christ, the ark of safety. All ye tempted and tried ones, come into the ark; there is room enough for all. Who shall be left out when God shuts the door? Who?”