CITY AND COUNTRY | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Association

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 47.

CITY AND COUNTRY.

A beautiful bit of country in northeast England, in which the contrast stands strongly out between the country and the work of men's hands. The country is fresh and green and beautiful, while the work of men's hands is in ruins. These ruins are of the old Whitby Abbey, formerly a Benedictine abbey to 867, then destroyed; rebuilt in 1078, by William de Perey, as a monastery for men. The stream of water is the River Esk, where it enters the North Sea.

"GOD made the country, but man made the town" is an old saying, trite and true. It grows ever more evident as the stream of years flows by. The country stands for freedom, for peace, for beauty, for morality. The town, the city, stands for slavery, for strife, for ugliness, for immorality.

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DO NOT misunderstand us. There has been wickedness, dishonesty, and immorality everywhere in this round world ever since the slimy trail of the serpent was seen in the Eden of God, and the heart of our first parents opened to receive his suggestions of evil. The flesh of humanity became the flesh of sin, the heart of humanity became the carnal heart, the heart of flesh, wherein sin reigns; and country as well as city has felt sin's weight and groaned under its curse.

God has sought to reach lost man in every way possible. "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." Ps. 19:1-4. Upon this, the late Bishop Taylor fittingly remarked, "God's primary school! God's primary day school! God's primary night school! God's universal, primary, day and night school!" Even so it is; and the man most affected by its teachings is the thoughtful one who is out under the open dome of heaven with heart and life open and responsive to all beneficent influences.

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THERE is sin in the country; there is wickedness and vice there; but never, unless transplanted from the city, do we see it in the same degree that the city reveals it. The surrounding influences restrain it. The heart has more time to think and meditate over the lessons taught in God's primary school of nature and the advanced school of His Word. It is when men begin to herd together for selfish purposes, with idle hours and contagious, dissolute habits that vice spreads strong and flaunts itself, and wickedness and crime become organized and bold.

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TRACE down the history of nations, and their decline begins when the cities become dominant. The first city-builder was Cain, the fratricide,—not Abel or Seth,—who, to exalt himself, called the city after the name of his son. Gen. 4:17. After the crisis of the Deluge, it was God's command that man

was to spread abroad over the whole earth, and make it blossom and bear like the Garden of Jehovah; but selfish man herded together again, sought to thwart God's plan, said they would save themselves, and builded a city, and called it "Bab-il," "the Gate of God." So their own story of building runs as they wrote it on the plastic clay in the land of Shinar, and burned it into brick which has survived the changes of ages. But God called their city "Babel," "Confusion." Gen. 11:1-9. And such has been the result of the great, selfish city-builders from that day to this.

THE country deals with man honestly. It meets him in all his moods. He knows by the outward tokens what to expect. A rough, forbidding surface often covers that which is precious, but it is not just there to deceive. A fair exterior often covers rottenness, but it is not designed to entrap him. Usually he sees on the surface what is underneath. The soil, the grass, the tree, the plant, the fruit, the grain, deal honestly, openly, faithfully, and to some extent stamp themselves upon his own character.

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NOT so the city; its best side is ever outside. The sightliest wall surface is often a sham. The finest exteriors are often a shell. The finest fruits and vegetables are on the top of the basket and box; the veneer of selfishness is everywhere manifest. And almost invariably it is there to deceive, to make something appear to be what it is not. The same element extends all through society. The most attractive exteriors often shut in the drunkard, the gambler, the pander, the harlot, the desperado. The meanest and lowest political plots, the darkest deeds of crime, are city-hatched and bred. The quick steps from innocence to infamy are taken there. The by-ways of crime and sin and death are legion, invitingly open to the careless feet; and sirens with voices as entrancing as that of Calypso lure to destruction. At the very best the stress and strife and struggle and intensity of city life wear on the nerves and life of the straightforward and honest, and the city must ever be fed by the life of the country, or it would die out. One or two generations from the virile country parents, and the family as a moulding power is gone, and yields to the fresh life and vigor of the country.

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THE deterioration and decline of every state is marked by its increase of urban population. Trace down the history of the past and mark invariably the downward trend of that nation or people whose offspring flocked to the cities, and the city life became the dominant moulding life of the nation. So went Babylon, so went Grecia, so went Rome, so is drifting downward the great Republic of the West. There are beautiful places in our cities—palaces rivaling the greatest dreams of splendor, parks which reveal in cramped ways and restricted limits the thought of God in nature, but the city is not the country. How the earthquake shatters its hopes, reveals its iniquities, uncovers its veneered rottenness, and lays open to the eyes of all its hidden shame; and the mightier ones to come will reveal them more and more. Get out of the cities into the purer, freer air of the country.

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TRUE, the country is not perfect. It has its drawbacks, its plague spots. Its beauty is marred by sin. But all these make us long for the "better country," even the heavenly, the earth made new, the green, glad earth with no waste deserts, arid soils, or hostile climes. There the glory of God will cover all the land as the waves cover the sea. In that earth will also be a city, Zion redeemed, the New Jerusalem, the capital of the new earth, living and glad and glorious with the streaming, effulgent life and light of God's presence, piercing to every part of that city of light, and making it all as open and glad as the day—that city whose Builder and Maker and Keeper is God. God's city, God's country, in very truth it will be, inhabited by God's children forever.