THE Saviour said to his followers, “In the world ye shall have tribulation;” and the Apostle Paul wrote: “All who will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.” People who profess to be Christians ought to believe that Jesus and Paul spoke the truth. Yet to-day, right in the face of their words, we hear this very class calling upon Congress and the State legislatures to enact laws in the interests of religion, so as to make it “hard for people to do wrong, and easy for them to do right.”
Again: Of Christians the Word of God declares, “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God;” and the Apostle Paul, speaking as a Christian, wrote: “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Galatians 2:20. This must be true of every Christian; for it is the very essence of Christianity. It is Christ who lives and who is manifested in the lives of true believers. Christianity is nothing less than the very life of Christ.
Therefore there is just as much need, and no more, of laws to make it “easy for men to do right,” as there was of laws to make it easy for Jesus Christ to do right when he walked and taught in Judea. And we learn from the Scripture that Jesus Christ encountered every kind of obstacle, and the fiercest opposition, to right living; yet he did right continually. Can he not then still do right, living in his followers to-day, without the aid of man-made legislation?
It is easy now for people to do right, if they will only go about it right. God has made it easy to do right. It is only necessary that the Word of God should be received into the heart by faith. There is infinite power in that Word, and that power is for the purpose of keeping the individual in the right path. Hence it is no more difficult for a person to do right, under any circumstances, than it is for him to have faith in the Word of God. And the only difficulty about this is that people are so unwilling to lay aside their fancied greatness and wisdom and [211] “become as little children,” trusting the Father in heaven with implicit confidence, as a little child trusts its father on the earth.