It is strange also how individual churches will sometimes
make misstatements about other individual churches.
It is especially so in regard to falsehoods told with
reference to prosperous enterprises. As long
as a church is feeble, and the singing is discordant,
and the minister, through the poverty of the church,
must go with threadbare coat, and here and there a
worshipper sits in the end of a pew having all the
seat to himself, religious sympathizers of other churches
will say, “What a pity!” But, let a great
day of prosperity come, and even ministers of the
gospel, who ought to be rejoiced at the largeness and
extent of the work, denounce, and misrepresent, and
falsify,—starting the suspicion, in regard
to themselves, that the reason they do not like the
corn is because it is not ground in their own mill.
How long before we shall learn to be fair in our religious
criticisms! The keenest jealousies on earth are
church jealousies. The field of Christian work
is so large that there is no need that our hoe-handles
hit.
May God extirpate from the world ecclesiastical lies,
commercial lies, mechanical lies, and agricultural
lies, and make every man, the world over, to speak
truth with his neighbor!
A GOOD TIME COMING.
As on some bitter cold night, while threshing our
hands about to keep our thumbs from freezing, we have
looked up and seen the northern lights blazing along
the sky, the windows of heaven illumined at the news
of some great victory, so from beyond this bitter night
of abomination a brightness strikes through from the
other side.
I have thought that it would be well, in these chapters
on the sins of the times, to lift before you a vision
of what our cities will be when the work of good men
shall have been concluded and our population redeemed.
I doubt not that sometimes men have shut this book,
thinking that the gigantic wrongs we depict may never
be discomfited. Lest you be utterly disheartened,
I will show you that we fight in a war in which we
will be completely victorious. This is to be no
drawn battle; for, when it is done, the result will
not be disputed by a man on earth, or an angel in
heaven, or a devil in hell. We shall have captured
every one of the strongholds of darkness. You
and I will live to see the day when gambling-hells
will be changed into places of Christian merchandise,
and houses of sin swept and garnished for the residence
of the purest home circles.
Beethoven was deaf, and could not hear the airs he
composed; but when the song of universal disenthralment
arises, and white Circassian stands up by the side
of black Ethiopian, and tropical groves wave to the
Lebanon cedars, we shall, standing somewhere, know
it and see it, and hear it. If gone from earth,
we will be allowed to come out on the hills and look.
We do not talk about impossibilities. We do not
propose a medicine about which we have to say that
it will “kill or cure.” For this balm
that oozes from the tree of heaven will inevitably
cure.
