What The Gospel Does

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 20, 1865

What The Gospel Does.

THE following extract from a lecture by the Rev. Mr. Clarke, a Unitarian minister, on Theodore Parker, is exceedingly suggestive. It is by the gospel, and not by the fine spun theories of human philosophy, that men are to be saved from sin. The gospel of the grace of God, is the power of God to salvation:

“Nearly thirty years ago I went down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The steamboat stopped one day, detained by running ice at Smithland, at the mouth of the Cumberland. It had about eighteen hundred inhabitants, but they had drifted together recently, and there was in the place no church, no newspaper, not even a hotel. The people were rude and savage beyond anything we know of here. Street-fights were common; men were shot in their tracks by their enemies every day. Whisky was more common than water on the tables. The place was a kind of Pandemonium, just as it was at Paducah, another town a few miles distant. Bullies and bravoes were kings of these places; oaths, fighting, drinking, gambling, the chief features of society. A few years passed. A friend who came from these towns told me they had wholly changed.—What was the influence? Some Campbellite, Baptist, or Cumberland Presbyterian, or Methodist circuit-rider, had ridden into the town with his Bible or hymn-book in his saddle-bags, and by dint of exhortation and argument and persuasion, had softened these rough souls, and induced them to think of God, Heaven, and hell. He showed them that they were fit for better things. He appealed to their higher instincts. He awakened those sleeping intuitions in which I believe no less firmly than Mr. Emerson. His sincerity, his purity of life, his unselfish purpose, touched their hearts. These rough sons of the woods, abrupt in all things, turned suddenly from evil to good.—A church is collected, a meeting-house is built, a school is established, good morals and decent manners arrive. This history is no invention of mine—it has been repeated again and again in the West during the last fifty years.

“I do not say that the churches contain all the religion, or that there are no dead-and-alive churches now, as there were when John wrote the Revelation. But, on the whole, the current of the religious life in a community, runs mostly in channels of the churches. The churches, like the banks of a river, confine the current, and so keep it a running stream. All the water is not in the rivers, and the beds of some rivers are dry; but the tendency of water is toward rivers, and whenever it is moving on, it sooner or later finds its way into one. So, if you were to abolish all churches to-morrow, in a year from now, you would have other churches in their place, for churches rest on the indestructible needs of the human mind and heart.”