GOOD ADVICE by Burlington Hawkeye

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 3, 1880

GOOD ADVICE.

By Burlington Hawkeye

My son, don't be in too great a hurry to accept "advanced opinions." It is "the thing" to be "advanced" in this progressive day and generation, but there's a heap of shallowness in it. Did you ever notice, my son, that the man who tells you he cannot believe the Bible, is usually able to believe almost anything else? You will find men, my son, who turn with horror and utter disbelief from the Bible and joyfully embrace the teachings of Buddha. It is quite the thing just now, my son, for a civilized, enlightened man, brought up in a Christian country and an age of wisdom to be a Buddhist. And if you ask six men who profess Buddhism who Buddha was, one of them will tell you he was an Egyptian sooth-sayer, who lived two hundred years before Moses. Another will tell you that he brought letters from Phœnicia and introduced them in Greece; a third will tell you that she is a beautiful woman of Farther India, bound by her vows to perpetual chastity; a fourth will, with little hesitation, say he was a Brahma of the ninth degree and a holy disciple of Confucius; and of the other two, one will frankly admit that he doesn't know, and the other will say, with some indecision, that he was either a dervish of the Nile (whatever that is) or a felo-de se, he can't be positive which.

Before you propose to know more than anybody and everybody else, my son, be very certain that you are at least abreast of two-thirds of your fellow-men. I don't want to suppress any inclination you may have toward genuine free thought and careful, honest investigation, my son. I only want to avoid the great fault of atheism in this day and generation; I don't want to see you try to build a six-story house on a one-story foundation.

Before you criticise, condemn, and finally revise the work of creation, my son, be pretty confident that you know something about it as it is, and don't, as a man who is older in years and experience than yourself, don't, let me implore you, don't turn this world upside down and sit down on it, and flatten it entirely out, until you have made or secured another one for the rest of us to live in while you demolish the old one. If ever you should develop into an "advanced" atheist, my son, just do that much for the rest of us.—Burlington Hawkeye.