June 16, 1898
A CIVIL government cannot practice the principles of self-denial.
THE outlook is just as bright for the Christian to-day as it ever was.
THE gospel is the best remedy for the ills of humanity; war, the worst.
SUNDAY laws stand condemned by the premium they are obliged to put upon idleness.
NO character is ever strengthened by leaning upon public sentiment or popular custom.
SIN entered the world through the individual, and through the individual it must be cast out.
THE power which is most to stir the world is not that of armies and navies, but “power from on high.”
UNDER existing conditions the peace lover can well count himself, as Abraham did, a stranger and pilgrim in the earth.
A RELIGIOUS state cannot be an effective remedy for evil until it is possible for one person to be righteous for another.
THE devil never worries over any movement for moral reform which invokes the power of the state instead of the power that comes through faith.
THE duties an individual owes to God, and the manner of discharging them, are matters which stand unaffected by the fact that there are a great number of individuals in the world.
ANY religious action by the state means the interposing of man between God and man,—the substitution of a sinful, fallible mortal for the “one Mediator between God and man,” Jesus Christ, and of human wisdom, authority and power for that which is divine.
LIEUTENANT HOBSON and his crew who took the “Merrimac” into Santiago harbor are not braver than the one who storms and takes the citadel of self, in the face of the fire from the forces of evil within it, and of the world without.
FOR religiously-inclined people, Sabbath laws are superfluous, since such people observe the Sabbath by their own preference.
For other people, Sabbath laws can do nothing but put them in a condition of enforced idleness. But such a condition is unnatural. Nature abhors it as she does a vacuum.
The only periods of absolute idleness for which nature provides are the hours of sleep.
As a worldly-minded man cannot be active except in a worldly way, and Sabbath laws are directed against the manifestation of worldly activity, they can, at most, only reduce such a person to a condition of idleness which is contrary to the laws of nature.
And as the laws of nature are the laws of God, it is plainly true that Sabbath laws, to be enforced by civil authority, have no place in the economy of God.