Sensational!—How tame most of us are in our presentations. Yet this message is the most dramatic, spectacular, sensational thing in the world. The final age is closing! The world is to end! Our Judge and King is coming! What is more arresting and gripping in the universe than that? And it is of itself so dramatic that it needs no cheap theatrical claptrap that belongs to the world of make-believe. We deal with eternal realities. Others seek to satisfy the natural cravings; we, to crucify them. They endeavor to please; we, to warn and prepare a
people to meet God.
Hobbies!—The study of academic questions in theology can easily be come so fascinating as to engross the mind and consume an unwarranted amount of time. A detail can be distorted out of its relatively minor place until it assumes an importance all out of proportion to its value. And sometimes it is made a criterion by which arbitrarily to test the orthodoxy of one's fellows. It may be but a detail of prophecy, or the interpretation of a hazy text, but it looms up until it fills the horizon. Beware of such distorted emphasis. Let us keep saving essentials sharply in the forefront. Minor matters belong in the background; and on some questions it is still wiser to be silent, awaiting light and recognizing our human limitations.
Optimists!—Let us counteract the chilling tale that we Seventh-day Adventists are the gloomy pessimists of the age. Nay, we are the only true optimists extant. It is the purveyors of the current evolutionary philosophy, with blind subservience to a hopelessly infinitesimal progression, who merit the epithet. It is they who look through spectacles of indigo with no radiant hope beyond. But to us, with the glorious prospect of Christ's imminent return to bring to an eternal end all sin, sorrow, variance, pain, sickness, death, separation, disappointment, and disillusionment, the future is roseate with celestial light. Blessed end less day soon to dawn! Let us as the supreme optimists of the age, tell it joyously to the world, and thus correct a blighting distortion of truth,
which is hurled against the remnant heralds of the gospel.
Practical!—As Seventh-day Adventists we are fundamentally opposed to the "social gospel" of the Modernist, a program that he substitutes for the transforming, catastrophic second advent of Christ, and which alone will establish His eternal kingdom on earth, through the utter annihilation of the present world order. But in our opposition to the un-Biblical positions of Modernists, some have swung too far away from the problems, the sins, the sorrows, and the heartbreaks of this present world. We must not steel our hearts to the physical needs of the world today, nor is the helpful hand and the active adjustment of patent wrongs a denial of ardent faith in the second advent. The world is languishing for a little more of practical love. The comfort and rest
of Jesus is for men and women now, while we work and wait for the eternal kingdom that impends.
L. E. F.
