[MAN’S ACCOUNTABILITY.]
EVERY sane man can and does believe and decide that he will do this, and that he will not do that, every day of his life. Hence our Lord, when he wept over Jerusalem, cried, “O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! how oft would I have gathered your children as a hen gathers her brood, but ye would not.” In this view of the subject, the man of God could say, “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.” In the same spirit, the Lord says, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me.” To the same amount, the apostle Paul says, “To whomsoever you yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are.” In the same Spirit, the New Testament closes, saying, “Whoever will, let him come.” This justifies the Lord in saying, “He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” This all being so, the Lord, in referring to the last judgment, refers to the wickedness of man, as the ground of their condemnation. He says, they who have done evil, shall come forth to the resurrection of damnation. They who do his commandments, shall enter by the gates into the city, and have a right to the tree of life. The Lord says, “Because I have called and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand and no man regarded; but ye have set at naught all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity, and mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me; for that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord. Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices. For the turning away of the simple shall slay them. But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be quiet from fear of evil.” Prov. i. 24–33. This, my friends, is the wisdom of God. It will stand when all human reasoning will go for nothing.
[THE NEW AND THE OLD.]
WE do not desire to prevent discussion and investigation, or to deprive brethren of great inventive genius from exercising their extraordinary powers, nor to deprive men of the pleasure of making discoveries; but we are not favorable to allowing every man the privilege of taking out a patent right for everything that may be new to him; because it may not only be old with others, but useless, or even an old and oft exploded error. What we need now is, not so much men to make discoveries and invent something new, as men to push the old, the well-tried, and that which is known to be valuable. We do not desire, on the one hand, to be everlastingly hearing some new thing, nor, on the other hand, prohibited from hearing any thing new. We do not desire to be ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth, nor to be never learning; but to have our eyes open to anything profitable, that may be advanced, and continue in the faithful practice of what we know. But the main work is to push the truth through the world which we already have. Nothing is more sickening and disgusting, than for some mere boys, who have hardly read a half-dozen volumes, to start out under a pretence of discovering new truth, “going on to perfection,” explaining the inner and outer man, the inner light, inner consciousness, conscience, the will, new modes of revelation, the manner of the Spirit’s work, etc., etc. We have had a perfect surfeit of all this kind of thing.