The Risk and the Gain by Adelaide D. Wellman

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Aug 4, 1914

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 41, No. 30.

The Risk and the Gain

By Adelaide D. Wellman

Freedom Eternally the Object Sought

By ADELAIDE D. WELLMAN

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," says an old saw. And it contains more truth than do most saws. The principle it expresses was involved in the purpose of the Creator when He gave to angels and to mankind the power of choice.

Mere Machines Not Desired

Had the Infinite thought best not to "venture" so much, He must needs have made His creatures mere machines. Certainly He would thus have guarded effectually against the danger of sin, with all its consequent misery. There would then never have been a Satan or a demon to wield superhuman power for malignant purposes, nor would there have been on earth a depraved human being to cast discredit, by his very existence, on the God who formed him.

But while there would have been this security against loss, what of the gain? Alack, all possibility of gain would have been foregone. Instead of responsible intelligences, there would have been only puppets.

One Advanced and the Other Fell

Though the possession of the power of choice on the part of Lucifer and those who became his followers, made possible their transformation from angels of glory to fiends, yet that same power was so exercised by twice as many other inhabitants of heaven, that they advanced to infinite attainment, past all liability to fall.

Likewise, while the inhabitants of earth, by misuse of the free will granted them, seem almost to have stamped as a failure the work of their Maker, yet in untold worlds

are innumerable hosts who, having chosen good instead of evil, have reached heights of happiness that would have been utterly impossible without the exercise of free personal volition.

Eventually

And eventually, all the disastrous effects of the "venture" will be erased. The experiment of sin will have demonstrated, to the conviction of the entire universe, the rightness of right and the folly of sin; and in the eternity of the future, an unmarred creation will be grateful that God "ventured" more than mortals can ever know, in order that they might be in the fullest sense free.