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RELIGIOUS MISCELLANY

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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 6, 1861

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 18, No. 10.

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RELIGIOUS MISCELLANY.

Do not keep stirring the ashes of dead things in your conscience; do not keep turning over the leaves of memory, debiting the soul with a thousand debts that you can never pay; do not keep looking within, trying if you can to strike a balance—that after all if you are not so good you are not so bad, and therefore that you have a chance of escape. Leave the whole thing; it is a bankrupt concern : look out from the ruin, look up to Him who has taken your debts upon his own shoulder.
The lightning may rend the gnarled oak; the earthquake may engulf the most splendid capital upon earth; the hurricane may scatter the noblest dynasties like drift-wood upon the waves of the desert ocean; but neither lightning, nor tempest, nor storm, can injure the redeemed soul of the humblest saint. All the winds of heaven may beat upon the least living branch of the living vine, but all their combined force cannot wrench that branch off.
Man's nerve can inspire him to do one grand, heroic deed; but it requires wonderful grace to enable him to go on patiently and persistently, fulfilling the small duties, and bearing meekly the petty trials of social, domestic, national, and individual life. Courage is far more easy than patience; thousands have courage to dare who have not patience to endure.
God comforts us in the midst of troubles by sanctifying those troubles to us. Not only are they needful, but God makes them work for good. The tear that springs from the heart cleanses the eye, and enables you to see beyond the limited horizon of time, and to catch a glimpse of the glory of that better rest that remains for the people of God.
The springs out of which streams of comfort will come to you, O believer, are not found in the marshes of this world, nor dug out by you in its cold, bleak rocks; they are found in the city of our God—they are in the uplands of glory—they are in the crystal fountains of Zion; they are in the Rock of Ages.
If we lived less in the present, and a vast deal more in the future, we should be happier than we are now. We have nothing to do with the present, but to conquer its temptations, to beat down its evils, to fulfill our duties to our God, and our obligations to all mankind.—Sel.