Reforms Not Popular by Beecher

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 1, 1864

Reforms Not Popular

By Beecher

REFORMS NOT POPULAR.—To attempt to redeem men from the thrall and the power of bodily passions and appetites, and the lower forms of social affection and of reason, and compel them to conform to their ideas, their laws, their usages, their customs; to their higher moral sentiments; to revolutionize life, so that it shall be the coronal power of the mind that shall work in human life and disposition, this has always been unpopular and hateful. There is nothing that to-day would make communities hiss and foam as water hisses and foams when hot iron or a live coal is thrown into it, so much as to take the law of love and go through with requisite power and authority to change men's pride and selfishness, and all their animal investments, and bring them up to the level of a true moral and divine wisdom. To make a man that is foul cast down the filth to the bottom, and make all the upper part of his life pure as crystal water—that process is one that men do not like. In short, casting the devil out of a man is a painful operation, and men do not like to have it done, either in whole or in part.