Challenged!—Each passing year confronts the gospel worker of this movement with increasingly difficult problems. Conditions of labor grow more exacting. The world's attention cannot be arrested with ordinary efforts, nor its challenges answered with ordinary information. The well-nigh universal religious apostasy on every hand; the secularized, godless education that is rampant everywhere; the rising tide of national, racial, and class tension that is sweeping over the earth; the steadily mounting encroachments upon human life and liberty, together with the ever-lifting level of general education, all conspire to make extraordinary demands upon our ministers and Bible workers today. The training and equipment of yesteryear will not suffice for this new hour when feverish intensity has taken possession of mankind. The situation is serious. Apostasy seeks subtly to bore from within, and assaults come with increasing force from without. These conditions constitute a challenge and a call, not only to consecration, but to a specific training and a fitness commensurate with the need.
Music!—It should never be forgotten that the advanced musical education in the world's great schools of music can sometimes be just as distorting and as detrimental to distinctive Adventism, as advanced teacher training in history, psychology, or education gained in the world's universities. The musical ideals gained under the tutelage of popular Protestantism are not necessarily more sound than her theological positions. Nor are the historic hymns of the Reformation necessarily sufficient for us now, any more than the theology of the Reformation will wholly suffice for the advent movement today. We must, without fail, keep Qur bearings on this point, which is of vital importance to our denominational welfare.
Dishonesty!—Beware of the man who is always ready to quote the Spirit of prophecy when it supports his personal views, but who is strangely silent when its counsels would neutralize or controvert his position,—and who tries to evade or explain away their force when they are called to his attention. Such a man is not seeking to know and follow the truth, but is merely seeking support for predetermined positions. This sort of juggling with the Spirit of prophecy is a species of mental and moral dishonesty that should deceive no one, and should be eschewed by all who see through its trick. Either the gift is from God, and its counsels are to be accepted in their entirety, or it is of human inception alone and should, therefore, be rejected in toto because of its claims. We should be consistent in one of these two alternatives. This journal, believing the gift to be of divine origin, accepts and seeks the full instruction of the Testimonies in order rightly to understand and follow the gracious light they shed upon our problems and privileges. They ever lead us to the Word, and conform to the Word.
Fallacy!—Never fall into the error of assuming that every sect or group that has opposed Catholicism through the centuries—and particularly the early centuries of her development—is thereby to, be automatically placed in the category of the true church spanning the Christian Era. The grossest and wildest perversions have marked some of these dissenting groups—far worse perversions than those of Catholicism. Allegiance to truth, therefore, and not merely antagonism to Rome, must be the criterion by which to judge and classify. Each teaching must be adjudged on its own merits.
Superiority!—There are workers who contend that an erroneous detail in some article or book will not injure their own thinking or conceptions. Yet they protest against their fellow ministers' reading those same statements lest they be injured or confused thereby. They thus imply that others do not have the discernment they possess, and must be arbitrarily protected for their own good. What insufferable egotism, and what depreciation of one's brethren!
Reprehensible!—The army has a very opprobrious term for the soldier who agitates against his appointed superiors and rebels against their instructions, or who snipes at his comrades, hampering their work by weakening their hands and adding to their burdens. And it has a very summary and effective way of dealing with such actions and influences. In the church, we use softer terms and often fail to deal with the offender. But his conduct is the more reprehensible because of the exalted moral, spiritual, and ethical character of his work and his high profession. Grave is the responsibility of those who are disloyal in the army of the Lord.
L. E. F.