p. 760 | DEPENDENCE ON GOD

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Tuesday, December 2, 1884

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 61, No. 48

DEPENDENCE ON GOD.

How strong is the desire in the natural heart of man to be independent of God. Men do not like to acknowledge such a Creator and Ruler as the Scriptures reveal to us. They are willing to worship if they can have a deity of their own choosing, and fashion him after their own standard. But to acknowledge a God who has made them, and who has therefore a right to require them to bow to a standard of his own erection, who in his sphere is the sum of all perfection, and who can accept of his creatures nothing less than perfection in their sphere; namely, the cultivation of all holy tempers and the crucifixion of all unholy ones, the full surrender of every rebellious emotion, and freedom from every debasing thought and act—such obligation they chafe to throw off.

As proof of this, listen to the jubilant assertions of modern Spiritualists, that there is no higher judgment for any man than his own conscience, and that no man needs any other redeemer than himself! He summons science to his aid, and bids her testify that man can get along without a God: and science, so-called, meekly acknowledges that away back at some unknown point of time, on some unknown rock, in some unknown region, projected into a universe not of its own creating, there might have been seen, if a microscope could have been produced powerful enough to detect it, an infinitesimal mass of vivified jelly, from which all things have since evolved themselves; and that original protoplasm may perhaps have been the direct work of God. And this much of God men seem willing to acknowledge; and they seem able to contemplate him with a degree of equanimity, if they can crowd him back over this infinite chasm, and reduce him to these infinitesimal proportions.

The same spirit, if we correctly interpret the action, crops out anew in Pittsburg, Pa. A brother sends us a copy of the Pittsburg Dispatch of Nov. 21, 1884, which contains a report of a meeting of the “National Humane Society” just held in that city. The first meeting having been opened with prayer, a Mrs. Collins, of Pittsburg, made a motion that each meeting be opened with prayer. To this a Mr. Brown, of Chicago, who nevertheless claimed to be a praying man, objected on the ground that it is “unwise to be continually teasing God with what we want.” That is to say, We have endured one prayer to God, and now let us go on with our business and forget him the remainder of the time.

How different this from that sense of continual dependence on God, which it becomes us to cherish,—that feeling so beautifully expressed in the hymn that we need him “every hour,” and that instruction given us by Christ himself that we ought always to pray and not to faint.

The motion was discussed by several prominent members of the convention, all speaking against it, until at the request of the chairman and another gentleman, Mrs. Collins withdrew, though under protest, the motion she had made.

We cannot help thinking that this society would be much more apt to be “humane” toward the objects its organization is designed to benefit, if it were more willing to acknowledge its own dependence on God.