Yet men have not been warned by all these things; nay, the same spirit has revived in very recent years; and could we unveil the misery which has been endured by thousands as the result of recent crashes, the impression might be deepened as to the madness of “making haste to be rich.” THE IDOL
AND THE
WORSHIPPER. Men have said, “To-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there for a year, and buy and sell and get gain;” but ere the year was closed, their gains have taken to themselves wings. The will of God was left out of view in their plans, and they were baffled.
THE END.
We must repeat—we have no controversy with commercial enterprise, when conducted in accordance with the wisdom of the Word of God. It is one of the means of binding nation to nation, and bringing back the alienated children of men to one wide family circle, according to the purpose of our Father who is in heaven. But that is not to be accomplished by outraging his laws; and the man, the company, the nation, which extinguishes the lamp, will be left to walk in darkness.—THE
END.When the butchers of the first French revolution were leading their victims to death, some of those who were doomed to die, were conducted, by a refinement in cruelty, along an alley into a garden of flowers, where only fragrance and beauty greeted their senses; but at a certain spot, inevitable doom awaited them, at the hands of men who thirsted for their blood—and we need scarcely apply the illustration. In their haste to be rich, men seem, for a season, to walk amid fragrance. Their path is all luminous with hope—such hope as man’s devices can inspire; but sooner or later they are hurried into misery.
“When infamous venality, grown bold,
Writes on his bosom, ‘to be let, or sold,’”
men have laid a snare in which, by God’s decree, they will be entangled; they have dug a pitfall, in which, by God’s decree, they will be taken.
CHAPTER VI.
RELIGION IN THE PROFESSIONS: — I. THE PHYSICIAN — II. THE LAWYER — III. THE DIVINE.
There are many symptoms of the reviving power of religion in our day. Some of the great questions which enter into the very heart of society are connected with the claims of truth upon the one hand, or the pretensions of those who would suppress it upon the other. The high courts of Parliament are convulsed by religious discussions. When wars arise, or are threatened, they often owe their origin to topics connected with religion. Periodicals which began their career in indifference or antagonism to the truth, are now obliged to do obeisance to it, if they would command the attention of men, and some even of those whose opposition was once a mixture of sneers and acrimony, have now to borrow weight and influence from doctrines which will be found ascendant when every form of error shall have vanished away. In a word, empires, countries, households, individual souls, are alike proclaiming that the kingdom of our Father who is in heaven must come—that His will must be done on earth as it is done in heaven.
Nay more, there is a kind of Christianity even among our infidels—that is, they owe not a little of what they hold to the very system which they disparage and affect to ignore. The truth is thus producing effects even in spheres from which men would gladly banish it, but into which it is making its way, like a rising tide, in spite alike of the indifference and the hostility of men. The friends of truth are thus encouraged. The collected light of the past and the present is projected into the future. Our nation, and the progress of truth within our borders, is a type of the world. In due time, religion will rule all; either the sceptre of love will guide, or the rod of iron will dash the nations.[29]