WE would call the attention of legislators everywhere to the fact that there are many people in this country who would like to be good, if the legislators would only give them a chance.
They would like to be good, but the laws of the country are not so framed as to make it an easy thing to be good. Hence they go on in sin.
They are waiting for legislation to be enacted which will make it easy to be good, and difficult to be bad.
For example, there are many people who would like to close their shops on Sunday; but if they should do so, without a Sunday law, some other persons would keep their shops open; and how can one person keep his shop closed on Sunday when another person—a rival in business, perhaps—is keeping his shop open and taking in money?
How can it be expected that an individual can afford to sacrifice money—actual cash—for mere religious principle?
Some legislation must be had so that a person can be true to the dictates of conscience without making any sacrifice of a cash value.
As things are now there is a broad way which leads down to ruin, and multitudes are traveling in it; while only a narrow way leads to life, and this is traveled by the few. There must be legislation which will hedge up this broad way, so that it will be narrow and difficult, and at the same time enlarge and smooth down the narrow road to life, so that it will be the easy road, instead of the other.
What do you think, legislators, of the task marked out for you?
Do you think that it is really difficult to be good in this world without the help of state legislation, or that such legislation can make people any better than they are?
The Bible says that it is impossible for any person to be good, under any circumstances, without a change of mind from the carnal to the spiritual.
It says too that it is just as easy for a person to be good after his heart has been renewed by divine grace, under any circumstances, as it was for him to be bad before that work of grace had been done. The testimony is that “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” Romans 5:20. Where sin abounded in the heart, before conversion, making the individual do that which is contrary to righteousness, now, after conversion, grace does “much more abound.” Certainly then it can be no less easy under the latter state to do right, than before it was to do wrong.
This is the testimony of Scripture; the Scriptural plan of doing right makes no account whatever of any aid from the arm of flesh.
It is always easy for God to do right; he cannot indeed do otherwise. And “Christ in you”—Christ, who is [99] God, in every one who believes—is the purpose of the gospel, and is the Scriptural and only way of changing from a life of sin to that of righteousness.