Editorial September 23, 1905 Issue

The Right Man

John B. Willis

A RIGHT start always means much for the success of an undertaking, and this is particularly true in the case of the individual who is trying to understand the doing of God's will on earth as it is done in heaven. The confidence, courage, and good cheer with which the enterprise is entered upon by the Christian worker, and the faith and persistence with which he continues his labors,—all will be largely affected by the man whom he has in view.

In dishonor of even the wisdom of Confucius, who declared that man's nature is fundamentally upright, much of the Christian teaching of the past has begun with the wrong man. Christian workers have been handicapped from the start by being taught to think of man as a depraved nondescript, weak and imperfect in every part. Through a belief in the law of heredity, he has entered upon his life a prey to dispositions and tendencies for he is in no degree responsible, and whatever is accomplished in the way of his betterment must be effected in spite of this continuous disability.

Explorers in classic fields rarely expect to find more than a broken trunk, whose single remaining limb, perchance, may give some suggestion of a form which, alas! no restoration can satisfactorily complete. With how much more enthusiasm would they search, did they surely know that beneath the debris of buried cities there would be found an unmarred masterpiece which should reveal the full glory of the Golden Age of Art.

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