Cooperate! — The strength of unity is universally recognized. When once a plan of operation is adopted, we should all loyally labor for its success. If unwise, a fair trial will disclose that fact and adjustments can be made. Better a poor plan with united effort than divided effort with a better plan. It is results that are vital.
Friendship! — He is a true-hearted fellow worker who comes to me privately as a friend and frankly tells me of my faults, giving constructive counsel for improvement in either method or conduct. Such is the Scriptural and brotherly attitude that should obtain between workers of this movement. Personal counsel, not public censure, is what will correct unfortunate tendencies
Safety! — Woe betide the worker who slips his moorings, and begins to drift away from the sure harbor of the advent message. There is peril away from the safe waters of the faith and the lee of the mighty pilings of truth that have stood the storms of decades. Lured out into the treacherous deeps of profitless speculation, many an auspicious bark has become a wreck on the shores of disaster, washed by perpetual waves of doubt and damnation. Ship ahoy! Safety first!
Blights! — Chilling formalism and flaming fanaticism are the devil's twin schemes fiendishly used to blight vital Christian experience in the advent movement. Either extreme is satisfactorily immaterial to our archenemy. The first keeps the soul back from that fresh, glowing fellowship with our Lord, imperative in these times. The other, breaking over into wild, ungoverned excesses, tends to discredit all genuine religious fervor. Thus in either case the living experience needful for this last hour is retarded. God help us to resist both of Satan's diabolical schemes.
Responsibility! — As we loiclk back over our labors, do we not all note with sorrow some who have drifted away, out of the light into night? Why? Of course each individual has the sovereign power of choice. But did we do our part? First, did we tie them so securely to the great verities that they could never leave save by breaking faith with conscience and conviction? But that is not enough. Did we bind them with cords of love to the Saviour? or were they attached more than we would wish to admit to the personality of the human messenger? Were they merely intellectually convinced, or in addition to that were they evangelically converted? Was theirs a religion of fear, or of love? of the head, or of the heart? Were they fascinated by brilliant addresses, or taught the word, and the secret of successful, continuous Christian fellowship with Christ? Mark you, these are not alternatives that have been listed; neither is complete without the other. It is the separation of the two — and the neglect of the spiritual — that invites ultimate shipwreck of the soul.
L. E. F
