THE FIRE DID IT | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Dec 15, 1887

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 13, No. 48.

THE FIRE DID IT.

WHILE Moses was up on the mountain, Aaron took the gold that the people brought him and made a calf for them to worship. When Moses came down and reproached him he was frightened, and stammered out, They brought their gold to me, and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf. He did not make the idol; oh, no, the fire made it; he only threw the gold in, and was not responsible for the result! It was a very strange and wonderful thing, but so it was, and the fire only was to blame. That is the way people talk and reason still. The world is full of just such cowards as Aaron was that day. Men do what they know to be wrong, do it deliberately, and then throw the blame on somebody or something else.

Mr. Moody says that he once went from cell to cell in the Sing Sing Prison, talking with the convicts. But he found only one man among them who acknowledged that he was guilty and deserved to be punished. All the others were the victims of circumstances. One man was drunk, and meeting another man as he was staggering home, he thought that he would play the part of a robber just for fun. So he pointed his pistol at the other man, and the pistol went off of itself and killed him. He did not mean to do it. The pistol was to blame. Another had been found guilty of forgery. But he was as innocent as a newborn babe. The pen, somehow, would write somebody else's name on the paper. The pen was to blame. He did nothing but hold it.

A young man comes home from college in disgrace. He has been caught in an act of malicious mischief or of beastly debauchery. But he assures his sad and confiding parents that he never meant to do anything wrong. Some other students led him astray and then left him in the lurch. He was as much surprised as anybody could be when he found what he had done. A bridegroom, before the honeymoon is over, is brought home between midnight and morning, dead drunk. When he wakes up from his stupor and sees how sad and horrified his young wife is, he protests most vehemently that he is not to blame. He only stepped into a saloon to take a social glass with a friend. But the liquor must have been drugged, for he soon lost all consciousness. Of course he was not blameworthy, but only unfortunate. It was the fault of the bar-tender or of the brandy. And so it is all around us. Men and women are meanly shirking responsibility just as Aaron did. He put the gold into the fire on purpose to make a calf. And we are told that after it was melted and moulded he fashioned it with a graving tool (see Ex. 32:4); and yet he told Moses that the fire made the calf. He invoked the agency of the fire to accomplish his foolish and wicked purpose, and then laid all the blame upon it. How transparent the falsehood! and yet how many excuse themselves in the same mean and dishonest way.

The truth is that in nine cases out of ten men's excuses for their follies or their crimes are just as bad as Aaron's was. They knew that they were putting themselves in contact with and under the influence of persons or things that would involve them in wrong. Those who handle pitch must expect to be defiled, and the fault is but their own. They could not lay it over on the pitch, for its nature is to defile, and they knew it.

With multitudes business is the fire out of which comes the idol that they worship. They take the pure gold of their young manhood into some place of trade and traffic. They mean to be honest, and yet they mean to make money. They encounter keen competition. They are told that certain practices of doubtful integrity are customary—that everybody does so. They sacrifice conscience to custom. They know that what they do is wrong. But it is the fault of the business and not theirs. And so it is in society. The lady in fashionable life cannot be sincere. Sincerity would be rudeness. So she tells what she calls white lies, and almost believes that she is not guilty—that she has to do what others do. And the politician adopts the theory that all is fair in politics as in war. And the ardent reformer uses doubtful methods for securing popularity and success, claiming that the end justifies the means. And so the world goes on, casting its personal guilt upon the scape-goat of circumstances, and half believing its own false and flimsy excuses.

An eloquent preacher says: "There are currents flowing always in all bad directions. There is a perpetual river flowing towards sensuality and vice. There is a river flowing perpetually towards hypocrisy and religious pretense. There is a river always running towards skepticism and infidelity. And when you once have given yourself up to either of these rivers then there is enough in the continual presence, in that great movement like a fate beneath your keel, to make you lose the sense and remembrance that it is your own will that you are there, and only think of the resistless flow of the river which is always in your eyes and ears."

There is little hope for any man who thus tries to excuse his guilt. If the prodigal in our Saviour's parable had come home laying the blame of his degradation upon the citizens to whom he had joined himself, or the swine, his father would not have welcomed him as a true penitent. But when he came crying, "I have sinned," he showed that he was earnest and sincere. What is needed in the preaching of the gospel is to awaken in man the sense of personal responsibility. When they quit excusing themselves—claiming that they are the victims of circumstances, or were overcome by resistless influences—and cry out with the prodigal, "I have sinned," they are ready to welcome that grace which can save the chief of sinners. But as long as a man fails to realize, or is unwilling to confess, his personal guilt, how can he repent heartily, and trust, as a lost sinner, in a divine Saviour?—Obadiah Old-school, in Interior.